Quick overview

Schöck Bauteile GmbH is a company of the globally active Schöck Group with around 1,000 employees. In the 2019 financial year, 13 companies in Europe, Russia and North America generated sales of EUR 202.3 million. The focus is on the development and manufacture of products with high building physics benefits as well as special material and installation properties. These include solutions for reducing thermal bridges on cantilevered components such as balconies, solutions for preventing impact noise in stairwells, thermally separating façade fastenings and modern reinforcement technology.

Interview with Ute Henke, Head of Competence Center SAP, Schöck Bauteile GmbH:

Initial situation

“Over the last 25 years, we have repeatedly made changes to our forms “on demand”. As a result, order confirmations, invoices and delivery bills from the individual Schöck national companies no longer matched up perfectly visually. The number of forms and the associated support effort increased steadily with each new language version. In order to bring our appearance back in line with our corporate design and to reduce the support effort, we set ourselves the goal of standardizing the forms and checking and implementing new requirements centrally in the future. We also wanted to replace SAPscript with Adobe Forms in preparation for future projects. At the start of the project and before working with Softway, we had a total of 234 different form layouts (59 forms in different language versions) in use for order confirmations, delivery bills and invoices. The clarification, adaptation and testing effort for comprehensive changes was therefore disproportionately high.”

“In particular, different processes and article designations depending on the country posed new challenges for the Schöck Bauteile GmbH team together with Softway AG, both in terms of standardization and technical implementation, which required a lot of clarification and creativity in the technical implementation.”

Specifications & implementation

“Our forms are based on the SSP Forms templates from Softway. They take into account all the elementary components of the respective form based on the SAP® standard. This enabled us to get started quickly with standardization at Schöck without extensive preparatory work. In the first step, the templates were adapted to Schöck’s corporate identity according to our specifications from Softway. This meant changes to logos, addresses, position tables, fonts, etc.

These Schöck templates were then checked by the specialist departments in the respective roll-out projects and the new requirements identified as part of the fit-gap analysis were transferred to Softway for implementation. Thanks to the Softway framework, the necessary country-specific requirements could be set for the most part without any problems via the customizing of the Softway tools. Schöck-specific requirements, such as country and language-dependent texts and formatting for individual materials, were reliably solved and implemented by the Softway developers in collaboration with our in-house consulting team. Throughout the entire project, our contacts at Softway were integrated into the Schöck project team and we were always in close contact regarding the status of outstanding issues. At the start of the project, our in-house form developers were trained by Softway in Adobe and in SSP Forms and supported by additional workshops as the project progressed. In this way, parallel to the implementation by Softway, an internal knowledge build-up was ensured in the project, which today enables us to process new requirements for forms largely independently.”

Results

“With SSP Forms and the customizing tool from Softway, we can now adapt and design the forms much more easily and efficiently. With the help of these techniques, we were able to replace the large number of language-dependent layouts in SAPscript with “one common layout for all” in Adobe Forms. The number of form layouts in sales was reduced from 234 to 3. This means a considerable reduction in the effort required for new changes. Language-dependent texts and designations are controlled in the Softway tool via customizing, which enables quick adaptation without programming. This also significantly reduces processing times for new requirements.”