State-of-the-art supply: SAP EWM Specification for SachsenEnergie
LOGSOL and Carsten Gutmann have known SachsenEnergie for a long time from many joint projects. The highlight to date: In October 2023, LOGSOL was chosen to develop a specification for the EU-wide tender for an SAP S/4HANA EWM implementation for the largest municipal energy service provider in eastern Saxony. Carsten Gutmann’s more than 15 years of LOGSOL experience as an SAP Consultant and Head of the Digital Transformation Business Unit and his team were required for this complex project. The intelligent Enterprise Resource Planning System SAP S/4HANA standardizes the processes at the electricity, gas, heat, water and fiber optic supplier with its approximately 600,000 customers. SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) supports the logistics processes as a Warehouse Management System. Gutmann reports: “In the award process, we were able to score points with references from around ten previous logistics projects with the group.” Now the energetic LOGSOL team was once again able to demonstrate its skills and knowledge.
Objective: Standardized processes, little administration
Laura Harnisch, Project Manager at SachsenEnergie AG, was impressed by the technical expertise and regional proximity of the solution providers from Dresden. After all, a great deal of coordination was required for both the comprehensive as-is process analysis and the target process definition.
SachsenEnergie wants to harmonize the processes between the central warehouse in Kesselsdorf and the meter warehouse in Dresden, make all EWM processes less complex, significantly improve them and keep the administrative effort at a minimum. Over the years, the extensive system has grown with the group, has been adapted time and again and is therefore very complex. The central warehouse already works with SAP ERP S/4HANA for inbound and outbound deliveries, but SAP EWM 9.5 is still in use for the logistics processes, for which manufacturer support will expire at the end of 2027. In the meter warehouse, SAP EWM 9.5 is only used to a limited extent.
“For users who work with in-house developed solutions every day, this is the standard. You need an outside perspective,” says Harnisch, describing the initial situation.
Carsten Gutmann offered the right perspective. He has proven his expertise and innovative strength in numerous SAP implementation projects, including the support of logistics planning for SachsenEnergie. “The constructive cooperation” motivates him every time anew. This time, he found it exciting to weigh up “whether a future process can be implemented in the SAP standard or whether a customization of the system is required” in the target process definition for the material flow.
Path to the objective: Numerous workshops, several times a week
This was found out in numerous workshops, sometimes several times a week. Even if it meant months of extra work for 15 employees at SachsenEnergie, Harnisch reports: “Everyone was happy to take the time because LOGSOL made the meetings enjoyable.” This played a key role in ensuring that both the interdisciplinary cooperation between three specialist groups from the materials management and IT departments and the cross-location collaboration between the central warehouse, meter warehouse and head office functioned smoothly.
“After the as-is analysis, we were surprised how many of our processes are not standard,” summarizes Harnisch. In future, more than two thirds are to be standardized. “Together, we decided which processes would be included in the standard or implemented individually in future,” says Gutmann. For specific requirements, the LOGSOL experts had to weigh up the benefits of adapting the system. “We wouldn’t have been able to do this so efficiently on our own,” says Harnisch.
SachsenEnergie plans to implement SAP S/4HANA EWM by 2028. “With LOGSOL’s specifications, we have laid the foundation for the coming years,” says Harnisch, summarizing the successful preliminary project. According to her and Gutmann, the pragmatic, intensive approach with many meetings on site ultimately led to success.