KAESER KOMPRESSOREN

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KAESER KOMPRESSOREN

Lifting the customer-centric service business to the next level

Compressed air can serve as a clean, reliable source of power, a very compelling
selling point nowadays. And KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE ranks among the world’s
largest and most successful suppliers of compressed air systems. Its global distribution
and services network engages about 4,800 employees worldwide and subsidiaries in
50 countries as well as partners in additional 60 countries. Our line of widely-used,
comprehensive air system solutions includes machines many have never heard of: rotary
screw compressors, vacuum packages, refrigerated and desiccant dryers, and
condensate management systems, as well as portable compressors, filters, and
blowers. We also provide expert services. However, a single common thread runs
throughout our business, shapes our products, and fine-tunes our services: delivering
exceptional customer service.

Insight accelerates time to value

We had to harness the power of Big Data to remain at the vanguard of our
industry in the 21st century. At the same time, we were ready to simplify our
SAP® software landscape. The SAP HANA® platform helped us achieve both goals. The
migration of our SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application to
SAP HANA took only 10 weeks and involved merely a day and a half of downtime
(weekend). Complementing SAP CRM for some functionality we have migrated our
SAP Business Warehouse within 7 weeks to SAP HANA®. The benefits have been huge:
SAP HANA has helped us accelerate core business processes and achieve
operational excellence.

By implementing SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA, we were able to enhance our
customers’ experience. Running on SAP HANA, database response times are now
five times faster than before. This has allowed us to bring the entire
lifecycle of the sales process under careful scrutiny – from lead management to
requirements analysis, solution planning, and solution implementation. And with
real-time information, we have streamlined our supply chain to deliver on
customers’ changing needs while generating healthy margins.

But our customer service doesn’t end with making and selling vital plant
equipment. Increasingly, we are called on to operate that equipment for our customers,
an important task we are uniquely qualified to fulfill. That’s our version of
“outsourcing.” Insight gained via SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA helps us shine in
this area and has enabled us to expand the service.

Big Data drives predictive maintenance

You will occasionally hear KAESER KOMPRESSOREN referred to as the “gold
standard” of the industry. The consistent high quality of our products has
earned us that venerable moniker. We follow through with premier maintenance services
that we took to the next level thanks to SAP HANA. The technology has enabled
us to advance to predictive maintenance. We can now pinpoint the need for
corrective action before the performance of our products is affected.

In collaboration with SAP, we developed a predictive maintenance
solution powered by SAP HANA. This solution enables us to monitor in real time key
parameters – such as specific power consumption, operational availability and
safety or compressed air quality – from each customer air station against
minimum and maximum allowed values. Service engineers can analyze this
real-time data from a portal without having to visit the customer site. This
accelerates the resolution of any problem, keeping customer operations reliable
and efficient. With the comprehensive view the portal provides, customer
service personnel have become more proactive and more customer-oriented,
ultimately making KAESER KOMPRESSOREN more competitive.

Moreover, maintenance planning can be closely aligned with scheduled and
current maintenance needs – which are determined by the particular operating
conditions of each customer air station. For example, the machine health can be
predicted individually per compressor. By storing in its data centers the Big Data
that results from monitoring machine operations, KAESER KOMPRESSOREN provides
the basis for sophisticated data analysis. This helps us further optimize our
service processes and furnishes highly valuable input for the research and
development of our next-generation equipment.

When applicable, air station performance reports generated by SAP HANA
are sent to customers. They can then verify our service performance against
their service-level agreements.

What makes our predictive maintenance solution cutting-edge is its computational
complexity combined with the scale on which it operates. It collects thousands
of real-time data streams from customer air stations; Big Data scales into the
terabyte range; and we collect, analyze, and act upon that huge amount of data
as part of our routine operations. Our predictive maintenance portal hides
these complexities while providing service engineers with Web-based access,
including mobile access. As a result, the portal keeps our service engineers fully
informed of equipment status at customer sites so we can provide a consistently
positive customer experience.

Key benefits

Our predictive maintenance solution has enabled us to proactively attend
to maintenance needs and increase service levels for customers. We are seeing improved
uptime of equipment, decreased time to resolution, reduced operational risks, and
accelerated innovation cycles. Most importantly, we have been able to align our
products and services more closely with our customers’ needs.

In addition to increasing customer satisfaction, lengthening customer retention,
and driving operational efficiency, our new SAP solutions have unlocked
considerable potential for the KAESER KOMPRESSOREN sales organization. For
instance, the convenience of being able to compare a customer’s station
utilization against contractually-agreed capacities helps us avoid bottlenecks
in supply. This makes for a win-win situation for our sales force and our
customers.

By thinking big and supplying new service
functionality to our customers, KAESER KOMPRESSOREN has substantially extended
its market attractiveness and reach. By running SAP HANA, we have strengthened
our position as a thought leader and market leader in compressed air systems and services.

Future plans

We use SAP HANA not only as an in-memory computing database, but also as
a rich development environment in which stored procedures play a key role. In
the near future, we will be running our profitability analysis as a stored
procedure.

We are also about to move all of our SAP Business Suite software to SAP
HANA. This includes the SAP ERP and SAP Supply Chain Management applications as
well as our SAP NetWeaver platform. The move will help reduce the number of
databases in our business application landscape and bring down our total cost
of ownership. We plan to deploy SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA in the cloud with
other cloud offerings, including the SAP Jam social software platform, to
enable a mobile and social CRM strategy.