Making two into one: EDI integration at CERATIZIT

The CERATIZIT Group, headquartered in Luxembourg, employs over 7,000 people at more than 25 production sites in Europe, Asia and America. As a manufacturer of cutting tools, the globally active company holds over 1,000 patents. At the end of 2017, CERATIZIT acquired the KOMET Group based in Besigheim, Baden-Württemberg, which in turn had various production sites and subsidiaries worldwide.

The continuation of a success story and the start of the EDI project with Mercoline.

The acquisition of KOMET required to turn two SAP systems into one. The declared goal was to integrate KOMET into the SAP system of CERATIZIT in order to provide the management with the resulting control and monitoring options for successful company management. In accordance with the requirement to implement the project in a short time, the IT project management decided to use the SLO method (System Landscape Optimization). The advantage of this approach is that it can be carried out much faster than individual rollouts and therefore the KOMET Group as a whole could be converted at a defined point in time, while KOMET's established logistics processes remained largely unaffected.

All mappings and technical connections to the SAP system therefore had to be adapted. Usually in such a project the EDI connections are converted successively one after the other. In the case of CERATIZIT, however, there was a fixed deadline for the sites all over the world by which everything had to work. We gladly accepted this challenge. Thanks to good planning and the early involvement of Mercoline, it was still possible to test everything thoroughly and ensure that all relevant processes continued to run smoothly after the go-live. As an internationally operating company, the CERATIZIT group has a wide variety of special processes, such as certain invoicing procedures for Mexico or ANSI X12 processes for the USA. The European automotive processes also had to be migrated without any interruptions in the supply chain.

Precision landing for GoLive

On time for the planned GoLive, all EDI connections had been adapted, tested and were functioning without any problems.

Despite the internationality and diverse processes, the project with Mercoline ran smoothly and without complications.
Sylke Stather, Head of IT-Team Sales Applications CT, Komet Deutschland GmbH

We at Mercoline are proud of this successful project and look forward to many more challenges.

EDI: Mercoline's Business Integration Services

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