Infotech Lead Europe: Automotive supplier Autoliv is consolidating its various EDI systems (Electronic Data Interchange) at its 32 European sites on a central platform – Seeburger Business Integration Suite to save time, reduces IT costs, and increase competitiveness.
Due to presence in several countries — that escalate maintenance costs of IT — the Swedish-American automotive supplier Autoliv decide to consolidate its EDI and IT landscape and manage data exchange from the Seeburger Business Integration Server.
A recent study by Detecon revealed that half of midsize and large German companies use 10 or more different IT systems. Since Autoliv used different IT systems at different locations, made cross-site modifications became difficult. Conversions became costly, time-consuming, and in some cases, impossible. The many different licence models, some of which were with the same providers, offered potential savings as well.
The new B2B/EDI solution (BIS6) maps both standardised formats and OFTP2, enabling individual adjustments to be made by the customer. The consolidation has halved EDI. It has made way for more transparency, central support, independence from the system provider and has done away with local systems.
Following EDI consolidation, all the ERP systems were also migrated to SAP ERP. The XML concept hugely simplifies the migration of the various legacy systems to SAP ERP. The double conversion only requires the process side to be adjusted during mapping.
The migration project at Autoliv took only one third of the usual time. In the next phase of migration, the finance and logistics data will be migrated gradually, avoiding disruptions in delivery.
