My col­le­ague Yan­nik and I have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to get a clo­ser look at the work of our col­le­agues at the Gra­fen­rhein­feld site, near Schwein­furt, from Ja­nu­ary to March.

When we star­ted last week, col­le­agues Da­ni­el, Made­lei­ne and Mar­co first show­ed us the soft­ware so­lu­ti­ons that are sup­port­ed by col­le­agues on site at the customer.

One of them is the so-cal­led Or­der Ma­na­ger. This is a pro­cess so­lu­ti­on for the au­to­ma­ted or­de­ring pro­cess of spa­re parts. It is a plat­form whe­re sup­pli­ers and or­de­rers can be con­nec­ted in­di­vi­du­al­ly ac­cor­ding to cus­to­mer re­qui­re­ments via an in­ter­face. The plat­form stan­dar­di­ses this data and pas­ses it on to the sup­pli­er in the de­si­red format.

A con­nec­tion of the plat­form di­rect­ly into the ERP sys­tem is par­ti­cu­lar­ly po­pu­lar with lar­ge sup­pli­ers, in or­der to be able to pro­cess or­ders au­to­ma­ti­cal­ly via the plat­form. Of cour­se, it is also pos­si­ble to con­nect buy­ers to the platform.

For this pur­po­se, the em­ployees at the Schwein­furt lo­ca­ti­on de­ve­lop the cor­re­spon­ding mo­du­les, e.g. for SAP, on site in clo­se co­ope­ra­ti­on with an ex­ter­nal de­ve­lo­p­ment team.

The ge­ne­ral con­di­ti­ons for a pos­si­ble con­nec­tion to SAP must then be cla­ri­fied on site at the customer’s pre­mi­ses. For ex­am­p­le, how does the cus­to­mer pro­cess sa­les or­ders in his SAP sys­tem and what are the spe­cial fea­tures of this? Each cus­to­mer has an in­di­vi­du­al cal­cu­la­ti­on sche­me and other spe­cial fea­tures that must be ta­ken into ac­count in the con­nec­tion and the cor­re­spon­ding Customizing.

We have al­re­a­dy been able to fol­low some cus­to­mer mee­tings on the pho­ne. It is in­te­res­t­ing to see what re­qui­re­ments the cus­to­mer has for the sys­tem and how ge­ne­ral­ly a cus­to­mer con­ver­sa­ti­on pro­ceeds. In the fu­ture, Yan­nik and I will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to dri­ve to cus­to­mers’ pre­mi­ses with colleagues.

Yan­nik and I are ac­com­mo­da­ted for the th­ree months in an apart­ment in Schwein­furt, which is pro­vi­ded for us by the com­pa­ny. Du­ring a short ex­plo­ra­to­ry tour we have al­re­a­dy dis­co­ver­ed the youth hos­tel, which we al­re­a­dy vi­si­ted durch­ing our trai­nee trip in September.