Burg-Wächter is a global manufacturer of locks, access control solutions, window protection, safes and letter boxes. The headquarters and largest production site (along with research and development, training center and central warehouse) are in the Ruhr area of Germany.
Other production sites are located elsewhere in Germany, Romania and China.
Burg-Wächter has a long history of manufacturing premium quality products in Germany. The company was founded in the 19th Century by F.W. Lüling, whose descendants have overseen expansion several times over. Today, Burg-Wächter use advanced industrial production methods, but the care of traditional craftsman techniques has been preserved.
Burg-Wächter UK act as the main UK and Ireland distributor for the parent company’s products and for other security products sourced externally.
o To deliver a fully operational SAP solution to a strict year-end deadline with most project activity to be completed within a 4-month period, by 2-3 consultants
o Provide Burg-Wächter UK with the level of support required to avoid the engagement of additional business resource during the project
o Meet UK-specific requirements within an existing non-UK template
o Provide change management to enable the effective use of SAP by a user base who had no previous experience of SAP.
o Migration of high volume of master data relative to the size of the business
"We were clear with Bluestonex from the outset, that we always planned an on/off switch over. We knew this would take more project planning and support, but we didn’t have the internal resource to run parallel systems. We were also explicit that the project had to be delivered on time, and on budget – and that’s what Bluestone fulfilled."
Andrew Field – Managing Director, Burg-Wächter UK & Ireland
Burg-Wächter extend their core SAP footprint into the UK onto ECC6 at the same price as SAP Business one implementations
Bluestonex were engaged to deliver a full ERP solution to Burg-Wächter UK (as a new SAP company code) adopting best practices already in place in Burg-Wächter Germany, for Purchase to Pay (P2P), Order to Cash (O2C) and Financial processes.
The full scope included:
o Master Data.
o Sales and Distribution.
o Logistics execution (Delivery Processing).
o EDI.
o Procurement.
o Inventory Management.
o Outputs (Such as Delivery Notes/Despatch Notes).
o Financial Accounting
o Controlling.
o Strategic Reporting.
o Security and Authorisation.
o Full ECC6 implemented across core modules within 4 months at a cost of <£150k.
o Improved regulatory controls.
o Introduced full real time integration between finance and operational processes.
o Provide consistent information across Burg-Wächter Group.
o Enable the building of functionality & expertise within Burg-Wächter SAP system & user community.
o Introduce common methods of working across the group.
Our pragmatic approach to SAP and our deep knowledge of SAP and industry best practice helped Burg-Wächter achieve their goals.
This experience in systems implementations helped the client in understanding that while technology is important, a key factor for successful implementation is business readiness and business capability to manage change.
To meet this requirement Bluestonex brought two areas together, Systems Implementation and Business Change running side by side as one implementation programme.
Bluestonex were engaged because of their reputation in core SAP ERP and because of the cultural fit & size of business helping other SME businesses towards their journey onto SAP technologies.
Burg-Wächter had considered looking at SAP Business One or similar sized ERP packages but after initial consultation with Bluestonex, the team realised that strategically and from a cost / value perspective, moving to SAP ECC was in fact the right decision. There were some drivers behind this such as their parent company in Germany was already using SAP ECC and licenses were available but in terms of functionality SAP ECC would give the flexibility they would need for longer term business growth.
Bluestonex firstly carried out due diligence exercise looking at different options from business one to other SME ERP packages available. Because of synergies with Burg-Wächter Germany and the need for consistency across processes and technology it was decided to move onto the existing platform as a new company code implementation.
In the initial scoping exercise, Bluestonex reviewed Burg-Wächter Germany’s as-is processes, SAP functionality, modules, landscape, periphery systems, sizing information, and interfaces. The UK company’s user capabilities & business functions were also analysed, to derive a new way of working for the UK business.
Following sign-off of the scoping document, the principal project phases from blueprinting to go-live were completed over a 4-month period.
Gaps between the existing SAP template and the UK requirements identified during scoping were resolved early in the blueprinting phase by agreement between Burg-Wächter UK, Group IT, business users in Germany and Bluestonex.
Workshops were conducted with the UK company throughout the blueprinting, build and UAT phases to ensure that the proposed processes were fit for purpose and would be fully owned by the business.
Throughout the project, there was close collaboration between the Burg-Wächter project team in UK and Germany, senior UK management and Bluestonex. This was particularly vital to facilitate the change management around organizational and processes changes, user training, data conversion and go-live planning.
The complexity and volume of master data to be migrated required an on-going work stream during much of the project.
The complete project life-cycle (Project management, functional consulting, technical consulting, training & data migration) was managed by Bluestonex, and the project was delivered on time and within budget, without any major go-live or support issues.
Project documentation was provided throughout, including formal scoping and blueprint documents, gap analyses, configuration specifications, user manuals and test scripts.