Bender GmbH is a global market leader for electrical safety solutions with a wide range of products manufactured in two production sites in Germany. It employs over 900 employees worldwide and more than 70 representatives in 16 countries.
For over eight decades, the company has been producing high-quality products that enjoy an excellent international reputation and are used worldwide in all industries for measuring and monitoring unearthed and earthed networks.
Lack of digital back-office capabilities led to increased costs and time waste
Manufacturing at Bender is already fully digitalized throughout its two production plants. The demand-driven production is equipped with the latest Industry 4.0 systems, including an MES system linked to SAP and processes that are mostly digitized.
In contrast, the back-office was managed in a manual, haphazard, and ad-hoc manner. Back-office employees still handled individual orders, approvals, and release processes manually and outside of the ERP system. Customer-facing employees used older stand-alone applications such as SAP R/3 to record and process customer information.
Moreover, connecting these applications was established via custom-made interfaces that the IT department developed, adding to complexity of IT infrastructure and convoluted processes throughout the organization. For example, connecting SAP R/3 to Salesforce was done with the help of one small integration application. In order to connect Sharepoint with SAP, Bender GMBH’s IT team had to develop an interface from scratch.
This manual processing in the back office and customer area resulted in high costs and increased time expenditure.
Digitizing the back office operations with Magic xpi
The growing importance of a safe power supply and the expected boom in mobility for electric and hybrid vehicles are positive developments for the Bender Group. But the key to successfully serving this growing customer demand lies is an agile manufacturing structure in all areas.
With the Magic xpi integration platform, Bender now automates and digitalizes its business processes in the back office and improves workflows, ensuring smooth operations, improved customer service, and reduced costs.
“Magic xpi is a strategic integration platform of central importance for our company. With its flexibility and versatility, Magic significantly supports the digital change in our business areas”, Oliver Böhmer, CIO of Bender GmbH
Magic xpi increases efficiency by digitizing the back-office functions and seamlessly connecting the back-office with the production floor.
Driving efficiency from shop floor to top floor and eliminating data silos throughout the organization
Bender strategically chose Magic xpi as its central integration platform to be used in all business units, specialist departments, and IT systems. For digital transformation in the back office and customer area to materialize, old workflows, isolated applications, point-to-point integrations, and older applications had to be replaced and integrated.
At the same time, the important DSGVO functionalities had to be implemented in compliance with legal requirements and integrated into the existing systems.
With the help of numerous standardized interfaces, Magic xpi enabled Bender’s IT team to connect business-critical systems such as SAP R/3, Salesforce, and Sharepoint easily, eliminating data silos as a result. Data exchange across departments and applications is now seamless and fully automated.
Digitizing manual processes and upgrading workflows
Magic xpi enabled Bender’s IT department to replace manual, proprietary interfaces, used by the back-office team, with a central integration platform with standardized interfaces.
By automating workflows and seamlessly connecting SAP, Salesforce, and Sharepoint applications with Magic xpi, Bender is digitizing its back office and increasing the efficiency of the entire company. With the middleware, processes and solutions are now implemented that were previously not possible. The need for customized interface development is mostly eliminated.
Strengthening and enhancing the IT department
The actions the Bender Group took to innovate their business processes have ultimately supported the efforts to modernize IT within the company. IT experts can now leverage newly found resources to accelerate the agile development of applications, create a collaborative environment, and address the growing demands placed on IT to find suitable solutions quickly and efficiently.
Why Bender ultimately chose Magic xpi to drive back-office digitization
With Magic xpi, Bender is digitizing its back office and increasing the efficiency of the entire company through automated business processes and workflows, seamlessly connected SAP, Salesforce, and Sharepoint applications.
Bender is already planning further projects with Magic xpi. Among these, the integration into Microsoft Office 365 and migrating the collaboration environment to Microsoft Office 365.
Are you ready to take advantage of Magic xpi capabilities to accelerate digital transformation?
