Follmann Chemie GmbH
Customer & challenge
Follmann is an international family-owned company in the chemical industry and part of the Follmann Group, which employs more than 700 employees worldwide. The product range includes water-based printing inks and low-migration adhesives for the packaging industry, decorative coatings for the wallpaper and decorating industry, high-performance adhesives for the wood and furniture industry as well as functional coatings and microcapsules for various industries.
The IT experts at Follmann Chemie were looking for a way to automatically transfer master data from Nintex for SharePoint to SAP. Up to now, this data was being collected and transferred to SAP manually. The necessary information was entered into a form section by section by the individual departments. Then this information was manually transferred into SAP – a timeconsuming and error-prone procedure. “In the first step, we wanted to enter the article master data into SAP automatically,” explains Sonja Ehlert, responsible for Intranet and Communication at Follmann Chemie. “Until now, we were using a form that offered very little flexibility. Product Management had to manually transfer the data from this form into SAP several times a day.” Ehlert estimates that it previously took around one hour to record the data of each material.
“The added value of ERPConnect Services is that it saves up to 90 percent of the time to enter article master data and provides a higher data quality.”
Sonja Ehlert, responsible for Intranet and Communication at Follmann Chemie
Solution with ERPConnect Services
“We were already using ERPConnect Services from Theobald Software for read access to SAP tables. We therefore wanted to test using the interface to populate a function module with data and transfer it to SAP.” This proved to be a wise decision. “Within two hours, in a web session with Theobald Software, we clarified the control of the function module and mapped out an example process for creating an article,” says Sonja Ehlert.
Challenge
Automation of data transfer from a Nintex
Workflow to SAP
Value added
Just-in-time data processing, avoiding costly
additional software, optimized use of resources
The IT department was particularly impressed by how easy it is to control the function modules and table queries from SAP. “The interface is practically self-explanatory,” says Konstantin Tsonias. “In addition, the interface gives us a great deal of flexibility in terms of making subsequent changes to the master data creation.” The solution was also accepted very well by the various departments. Now they simply fill an electronic form with data. This form and a Nintex workflow prepare the data. ERPConnect Services then transfers the data to SAP. Articles are now entered early on and used by the next departments directly in SAP. “Creating material is now a matter of 5 minutes instead of an hour,” Sonja Ehlert concludes.
