Global data migration: fast and secure as a managed service

The automotive and industrial supplier Schaeffler has been using SAP as the central platform for all business applications for many years. In 2011, the company decided to set up a program to migrate the remaining legacy systems to the central SAP system.

Global family business

The Schaeffler Group is one of the world's leading integrated automotive and industrial suppliers. With more than 82,000 employees, Schaeffler is one of the world's largest family-owned technology companies and has a global network of production sites, research and development facilities, and sales companies at around 170 locations in 50 countries.

Its main customer is the automotive industry. The Automotive division develops and manufactures pioneering products in the areas of engine, transmission and chassis systems.

A central SAP system

As part of the global SAP rollout program, a large number of non-SAP ERP systems in the Group were to be replaced. In addition, several existing SAP systems were to be consolidated into one central SAP system and one client with standardized processes.

A Herculean task and, in view of the wealth and heterogeneity of the data to be transferred from a wide variety of source systems, a labor-intensive and delicate undertaking, especially for data migration.

If something does not go according to plan and the systems come to a standstill as a result, this can cost a company in the automotive supply industry dearly. In the event of production downtime, high contractual penalties can quickly become due.

Car manufacturers cannot wait for components for their production, but are dependent on just-in-time delivery from their suppliers.

The Herculean task of migration

Schaeffler already had extensive experience with SAP migrations and was familiar with the company-specific challenges and problems. The countless data sources alone - different SAP systems on different release levels and systems from several third-party providers - posed a major challenge.

The factors of time, globality, speed and security had to be mastered. The individual projects within the global rollout program were highly synchronized and required precise coordination across national borders and different time zones. Process changes increased the complexity of the migration task.

Make or Buy

In addition to technical expertise, the employees needed to have a high level of professional competence and an understanding of the process and application world above the data level.

As Schaeffler IT does not consider data migration to be its core task, a make-or-buy decision was made to appoint a specialized consulting firm for the data migration.

Managed service: everything from a single source

Schaeffler commissioned Heidelberg-based cbs Corporate Business Solutions to take over and implement the entire data migration within its global rollout projects as a managed service.

As a solution provider for global system transformations and data migrations, cbs supplies its customers with everything from a single source. In addition to the purely technical implementation at system and data level, the consultants act as migration consultants and sub-project managers to ensure that international transformation projects are precisely planned, integrated into the existing program organization and implemented in a methodical and structured manner.

Competent advice is indispensable, especially when it comes to mastering complex data migration requirements. Consultants who combine technical migration knowledge with in-depth process and application expertise are a success factor.

Eye level as a success factor

A robust migration concept is the basic prerequisite for a successful implementation program over several years. At Schaeffler, workshops were therefore scheduled at the start of the project, in which the consultants from cbs clarified the migration requirements in detail with Schaeffler IT and the project-specific concepts directly with the specialist departments.

Successful communication on an equal footing is crucial to the success of this conceptual groundwork: migration consultants and specialist departments must understand each other, the transfer of specialist business content, business processes and application configuration to the technical level of system and data structures must work in terms of linguistic communication and be understood by both partners so that a consistent and feasible result can be achieved in detail.

Migration template

The migration consultants primarily supplemented the customer's knowledge of central business objects such as parts lists and orders with the necessary expertise on the structure and interaction of the associated database tables below the application level.

The result of the intensive initial phase was a project strategy suitable for the group of companies and a technical migration concept containing the target structure of the data, rules for its implementation and the list of all objects to be migrated.

Together with the employees of the Schaeffler Group, migration templates were developed with the aim of reusing them in the individual rollout projects without having to reinvent the wheel each time.

Embedded in the Schaeffler Group's global rollout program organization, cbs, as the central service center, was thus able to carry out multiple migrations on a template basis and implement data transfers from heterogeneous source systems using a standardized procedure.

Enterprise Transformer

The transformation software cbs ET Enterprise Transformer (cbs ET) from the Heidelberg-based consulting firm was used to carry out migrations from any system to a central SAP system in a standardized, secure, fast and efficient manner. In order to realize cross-project synergies, a template-supported migration approach was consistently pursued.

The standard software cbs took over the migration, conversion and harmonization of the data. Equipped with comprehensive functions for selecting, validating, transforming and updating data, every business object with all its structural dependencies can be mapped, transformed and transferred. The data flow always remains transparent and traceable.

China in the morning, USA in the evening

During the initial 15-month migration project, flexibility and enthusiasm were required. ERP migration objects from the areas of SAP Material Management, Sales and Distribution, Product Planning, Quality Management and Warehouse Management had to be processed for five countries - Germany, France, the Czech Republic, the USA and China.

In a project of this magnitude, it is inevitable that requirements will change, the work intensity will increase significantly at times, and additional services such as additional data validation and tests will become necessary.

The fluctuating workload was compensated for by precise resource planning. As several international projects were carried out in parallel, it was necessary to support different locations around the world around the clock; due to the time difference, sometimes an extended working day started in the morning with China and ended in the evening with the United States.

Thanks to the standardized, tool-supported data migration with cbs ET, the migrations commissioned by the Schaeffler Group were completed on time, in quality and within budget.

Various legacy systems and local databases and applications were replaced, the number of external systems was reduced and replaced by a consolidated system landscape with standardized processes.

Users at the global locations also benefit from harmonized processes and data to solve their daily tasks.

The employees of the GSP (Global Solutions & Projects) team in Nuremberg saw their main problem of establishing a secure, transparent, accelerated and cost-efficient overall solution for complex data migrations successfully solved.

Gerhard Stößel, Director Global Solutions & Projects at Schaeffler, emphasizes:

"Data migrations have repeatedly caused us problems in recent years. We have got these under control. Thanks to cbs, we no longer have to lose any sleep over data migration."