SAP Rollout at BWF Envirotec in China: All locations under one single IT roof

The family-owned company is the leading international supplier of filter media for industrial filtration and product filtration as well as for the separation of solids and liquids. With sales and production sites in Australia, China, Germany, India, Italy, Austria, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, the Czech Republic, and the USA, as well as a sales network in more than 50 countries, BWF Envirotec guarantees market-driven, tailor-made solutions and a comprehensive solutions service.

But in today’s dynamic business environment, competition is intense. In order to remain financially successful in the future, BWF Envirotec is constantly developing innovative filter products and applications and bringing them to market. It is just as important for the company to constantly improve its business processes and make them more efficient. Essential prerequisites for this are a consolidated IT landscape with uniform operating processes across all locations.

The foundations have already been laid, as BWF Envirotec has been handling its core processes for years with the integrated functions of the SAP ERP software. Under the umbrella of the central SAP ERP system, all sites worldwide will be successively merged in terms of application technology - as far as legally and technically possible. Since the sales and production location in Turkey has been integrated into the SAP software for some time, there was already a template with predefined ERP processes available for the SAP rollout in other locations.

Said and done. As a result of the template-based rollout, the Chinese subsidiary of BWF Envirotec, based in Wuxi, has recently been integrated into the central SAP ERP system. The SAP functions for material management (MM), for sales and distribution (SD), for financial accounting and controlling (FI-CO), and partly also for production planning and control (PP) have been installed at the site in China.

The positive effects of the SAP rollout quickly became apparent. This has noticeably improved the efficiency and transparency of processes - from sales to material requirements planning for production (MRP) right through to accounting.

Since the BWF Group in China conducts its financial data exclusively in SAP ERP, it not only has a clear view of outstanding receivables, but also particularly of unpaid advance payments. This is very important because doing business with local customers is often based on advance payments. In order to be able to manage the open payments directly in SAP ERP, the internal IT team and ORBIS have developed a streamlined but effective solution. It combines standard functions of the FI modules with user exits and inhouse developments. This ensures a high level of transparency in advance payments and reduces the effort involved in data collection to a minimum.

^{Source Photo: © BWF Group}

Likewise, all relevant information on business development is promptly available to the management team in China and it can steer it even more purposefully. Since Controlling Department at the German headquarters has access to these financial figures, it can create financial statements more easily and faster, so that the management team in Germany also receives an insight into the development of the location in China at all times. The unification of financial reporting, which had become necessary as a result, made existing SAP BW reports, which were already ready for use, considerably easier.

For the success of the rollout project it was also important that the consultants at ORBIS Consulting Shanghai carried out the training of the key users in China for the handling of the SAP ERP FI-CO module in the national language and also that they be provided training materials in Chinese.

The ORBIS consultants also assisted the key users with end-user training and aided the China subsidiary in the integration tests as well as in the preparation and implementation of the productive start-up. Regular project reporting also kept the management in China and Germany up to date with the current state of implementation.

Based on the positive experience gained during the SAP rollout project, BWF Envirotec entrusted ORBIS Consulting Shanghai with the support of the SAP FI-CO modules and processes in China.

But that’s not all: In the next step, the still missing functions are to be installed in production planning and control, and individual processes such as the printing of the production documents for web material or the recording of quality data of the finished product are to be integrated into SAP ERP. In addition, the introduction of the SAP module for maintenance (SAP PM) is planned for the near future.