- Success Story
REHAU has paved the way towards Industry 4.0
SAP S/4 Implementation
With the introduction of SAP S/4, REHAU has paved the way towards Industry 4.0.
For 60 years, REHAU has been a premium supplier for the international automotive industry. The innovative and durable polymer materials made by REHAU have travelled on our roads a million times — in the form of rear spoilers, bumpers and air duct systems. As a development partner and system supplier, REHAU's automotive unit, with their 7.000 employees, manages highly complex processes every day — just-in-time.
Therefore, of utmost importance are reliable IT systems that enable smooth production and logistics processes as well as the flexible development of new solutions. But, like many other companies that have grown, REHAU Automotive developed a very heterogeneous IT infrastructure with a multitude of legacy systems over the years. In day-to-day business, this repeatedly led to inefficient processes. In turn, this made it difficult to keep up with an increasingly digital and ever faster future.
One clear goal, many challenges.
Therefore, REHAU Automotive was looking for a central, future-proof platform — a solution that would allow both end-to-end processes across different company areas and meet the increasing demands of industrial customers in an easily scalable way. REHAU now relies on SAP S/4. Together with MHP as its technology and project management partner, a new state-of-the-art system landscape was created in just two and a half years. The full scope competence in the field of SAP S/4 — especially in the automotive environment — was a deciding factor when MHP took on the project during the blueprint phase.
The implementation was carried out in the template approach. Initially, an individual S/4 template was developed for the Hungarian REHAU plant. This formed the basis for any further scaling and the transfer of the template to the German REHAU corporation.
The biggest challenge here: All master data had to be brought together from many heterogeneous sources — this made the transformation and enrichment of the data very time consuming. In addition to that, REHAU was pushing ahead on other projects in order to modernize the product lifecycle and manufacturing execution systems. Obviously, these projects had to be taken into account during the development and integration of SAP S/4.
SAP premiere at REHAU in Schwarzenbach.
The REHAU plant in Schwarzenbach am Wald (Bavaria) was chosen as the German pilot location for the new SAP S/4 set-up. There, the successful go-live took place just in time for the beginning of the new decade. Today, the platform harmonizes the business processes for the most important areas of the automotive division of REHAU — including all of the accounting procedures from each German location.
At the same time, it creates important standards for Industry 4.0 and is quickly scalable to the increasingly dynamic automotive environment. With SAP S/4, REHAU is ready for the Digital Turn, and once again proves the high level of innovation that goes on behind the scenes of the quality “Made in Germany” label. Thanks to a uniform master data model and a flexible architecture for the connection of existing legacy systems and local applications, it was possible to significantly reduce system breaks and interfaces. With the SAP S/4 system, REHAU can ensure more efficient and error-free processes. Now, after the successful completion of the project, the path is set to create even more potential from digitization in the future.
Voices
"With the successful S/4 system implementation, we were able to standardize our processes and create a uniform digital platform through the rollout-ready overall architecture to ensure fast and digital scalability for REHAU Automotive."
Dr. Wolfgang Springer
CIO REHAU Automotive
