Dig up data treasures and become faster

The entire industrial world is undergoing a transformation – this is not news. Advancing digitalization, ever-increasing competition and vulnerable, complex supply chains present all companies with very significant challenges that require a great deal of flexibility and speed. KAMAX is a pioneer in many respects, but speed is not one of them in some cases. Oliver Gantzert, CFO of the KAMAX Group, urgently wants to change that – with the use of data from all areas of the business and a more flexible budget planning.

Every day, the production halls of our plants create a huge treasure chest of data. Setup times, part counts, temperature images: All these figures are only partially recorded and rarely evaluated. Those who do can understand and simplify their processes much better”, explains CFO Oliver Gantzert. One example is the heat treatment furnaces. If there is an error at the machine and a temperature fluctuation makes our screws unusable, it sometimes takes several hours before the process is stopped or adjusted. “It would be ideal, if we could collect all the data from the process in real time and evaluate it simultaneously, so that not a single part is misproduced in the end.”

This data and the opportunity to optimize processes exists throughout the KAMAX world in every department. Together, IT and Nexineer, as well as the Business Intelligence department, are on the way to exploiting these opportunities. One of the most significant steps in this regard is the gradual implementation of S4/HANA, the new SAP platform for KAMAX. The first milestone is due in July 2022: That’s when the system will be rolled out at the new Chinese plant in Jintan. A rolling sales planning based on the SAP Analytics Cloud platform will be launched on a global scale at the end of 2022. S4/HANA is also accompanied by the need to rethink and question all core processes, because the SAP product also creates a new process template for the entire corporate group. S4/HANA should ultimately be implemented at all locations by 2027.

For the next two years, our CFO has his focus on one point in particular: the budget process. Currently, KAMAX always plans financially for a year in advance, including extensive cost center planning. There are a lot of people from all levels involved in the process, and Excel still plays a major role within the planning. “But, the world no longer thinks in a rigid one-year rhythm. Today, changes happen within a few weeks. We have to be able to react to them more quickly”, Oliver Gantzert clarifies. The solution: Use intelligent, data-driven IT platforms to reflect and adjust current budget planning at much shorter intervals. “We want to deal with future challenges in terms of content and not dwell too much on the past.” Overall, the process around budget planning should thus become much more flexible and require 80 percent less manual effort. The time saved will then be used to adjust the entire organization to a changed environment more frequently, for example 1x per quarter. One step of many towards a faster reality.