Compressed air systems specialist migrates global process automation to the cloud

Company Overview

Kaeser Compressors is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of compressed air products and services. They have 7,000 global employees in 140 countries.

Business Challenge

After 10 years of using SAP BPA on-prem to manage the automation of their systems, Kaeser learned SAP was ending support for its custom Java stack and many products that used it, including BPA. Kaeser uses a central SAP S/4HANA system where data and processes for the entire global company converge at their headquarters in Coburg. As a global company, their systems must run reliably 24×7.

Solution

Kaeser’s CIO decided to move their workload automation from SAP BPA to RunMyJobs – both developed by Redwood – and to switch from on-prem to SaaS. This solution allowed Kaeser’s team to keep using the same automation technology they were familiar with, while liberating the IT team from time-consuming updates, upgrades, and maintenance.

Redwood enabled Kaeser to optimize how their critical business processes were automated, including sales and distribution logistics, accounting, and their Global Trade System (GTS).

• Sales and Distribution Logistics:  Redwood controls the jobs that provision labor supply to eliminate idle time.  When Kaeser’s automation tasks need to be postponed for any reason, the Redwood system calculates and adjusts customer shipments in real-time to accommodate the change.
• Global Trade System (GTS):  Redwood helps manage all exports. It orchestrates cross-system processes in SAP S/4HANA and GTS calculation, and carries out and automatically updates monthly customs preference processing.
• Accounting:  All periodic reports, including account statements, reports, sales reports, and work lists of defective materials, are run by Redwood. The process automatically generates 10 to 15 lists per country and distributes them to the appropriate contacts.

Results

The Kaeser partnered with Redwood Professional Services as part of the move to RunMyJobs to help better orchestrate their processes and reduce system load. 

With the improved orchestration, Kaeser no longer needs to create separate processes for each country. Today, a single automated process chain in RunMyJobs enables Kaeser to supply over 40 countries. The improved automation efficiency, and reduced administrative effort of RunMyJobs SaaS allows a small, core team to centrally manage all automation and intervene quickly in the event of problems.