Vaillant Group Digital Transformation Initiatives

About the Customer

Founded in Remscheid over 140 years ago, the Vaillant Group today supplies innovative hot water, room heating and cooling solutions to countries all over the world. Our company develops high-efficiency products that save energy, conserve resources and enhance people’s quality of living. Vaillant Group employs around 13,000 members of staff around the world and is the second largest company in the European heating, ventilation and air conditioning sector and a globally recognised leader in technology.

Scope and Challenges

The Vaillant Group is currently defining its SAP Roadmap, which among other things includes migration to HANA and S/4HANA. For the calculation and identification of the necessary measures, business requirements and project contents, the analyst firm West Trax was commissioned with an analysis and evaluation.

The results were the basis for the catalog of measures and the offer of the service provider, who will carry out the migrations at Vaillant.

In order to implement these steps, Vaillant needed to gain transparency about the current use of the system and the supported business processes in the company codes as a basis for future requirements. With Fit-Gap analyzes, it should be identified which requirements can be realized in the future S / 4HANA standard, which prerequisites apply and what cannot be represented in the standard. An important component was also the identification of the own developments which are still needed later and the definition of the necessary adjustments.

Outcome and Implications

Eckhard Kloth, Group CIO at Vaillant, seems satisfied with the analyst's analysis and opinion: "West Trax has provided us with complete visibility into our historically grown SAP system and its use by our nearly 3,000 users in a very short time all business areas. We now have all the necessary facts that we need to define the project and business requirements and for a reliable effort determination. In addition, we have all the details at our disposal to future-proof our aging system and remove ballast. This will enable us to drastically reduce the costs to be expected, especially for the conversion of proprietary developments to S / 4HANA."

Grown SAP landscapes are complex and intransparent in many companies, and good project preparation is essential to avoid surprises, unnecessary overhead, and unexpected expenses. Reliable facts can evidently create transparency here. The advantage of the West Trax methodology, according to the supplier, is that it does not require any workshops, that it analyzes the actual system usage automatically and thus can deliver fast results.

Additionally, Vaillant Group transformed their Enterprise Performance Management process by selecting CCH Tagetik.  Vaillant decided to use CCH Tagetik as its tool for multi-year planning. It was fully integrated into the SAP HANA environment introduced at Vaillant. Employees have a direct link to the data from the business warehouse, making planning processes significantly faster and more accurate.

Quotes

"It was only on the basis of these objective facts that our service provider was in a position to create a comprehensive and comprehensible offer in order to carry out the project successfully in our interest. In addition, this knowledge provides us with sufficient security to minimize project risks and to maintain control. " - said Eckhard Kloth, Group CIO at Vaillant

"We were looking for a planning tool that really thinks ahead in tandem with us and that's exactly what we found with CCH Tagetik." -said  Christoph Siemons, Head of Planning & Forecasting at Vaillant Group