Global Workload Automation: Optimization of Sap Processes at SICK AG

SICK AG has been experiencing continuous annual growth of almost ten percent for years, which places high demands on IT. The automation of recurring tasks is crucial in order to efficiently manage the IT landscape, which has doubled in size in the last five years, and to ensure the security of globally networked processes. SICK currently operates 38 SAP systems, eight of which are relevant for production. Historically grown, partly unmonitored solutions for workload automation led to problems, as they could not fully map the entire process flow.

In order to achieve ambitious medium-term sales targets, SICK AG is intensifying cooperation between its employees worldwide. New tasks, such as the systems business, increase the complexity of processes and the number of interfaces within the company. Therefore, a uniform and scalable ERP infrastructure is required in order to homogenize the previously costly and complex system landscape with over a dozen different systems. As part of the "SAP Global" project, the automation of processes across system boundaries and time zones is being driven forward with a central control point in order to effectively manage the strong networking of systems.

When the SAP Global project was launched, the IT team at SICK AG discovered that clean job processing was not guaranteed in the SAP standard. Users often worked with the "current date", which depended on the UTC system time of the SAP systems and led to incorrect values in job variants. In order to centralize control over all job processes worldwide and ensure the security of critical processes, it was decided to implement a central workload automation solution. Following practical tests, Streamworks was chosen as it offers a modern architecture and is based on Microsoft technologies. In addition, the use of Streamworks by Arvato Systems ensures the quality of new releases.