PILLER Blowers & Compressors: Digitalizing and automating company-wide processes to build the future workplace
Customized SAP Build Work Zone for an enhanced employee experience across the SAP solution portfolio
PILLER Blowers & Compressors, a manufacturer of products for the process industry, wanted to improve its employee experience and IT system usage. With a complex hybrid system landscape from SAP and third parties, the company used SAP Business Technology Platform for user and system integration to harmonize access management and create a role-based digital workplace.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Industrial manufacturing | Moringen, Germany | 500 employees | projekt0708 GmbH |
faster access to the most important business workloads.
of employees able to access PILLER Work Zone for daily tasks.
intranet zones for employees, managers, and learning.
Chief Information Officer, PILLER Blowers & Compressors GmbH
Integrating a complex hybrid landscape into a central workplace
PILLER Blowers & Compressors GmbH develops, designs, and manufactures high-performance blowers and compressors for the process industry. For more than 100 years, the company has supplied efficient and customized machines for use in industries such as food, paper, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.
PILLER had been using a large number of SAP solutions and third-party software products. This complex hybrid software landscape resulted in challenging process integration across different workflows and interfaces for employees, increasing the need for training and requiring longer onboarding periods. Depending on their roles, employees had to log into up to five or six different systems requiring different credentials and offering distinct user experiences.
Rapid growth meant the business needed to provide its global workforce with easier role-based access to relevant information. Without a computerized workplace or access to the intranet, the significant blue-collar or “deskless” workers had no direct link to company information, safety instructions, or digital processes such as leave requests or learning content. Plus, its intranet was outdated and needed replacing. PILLER wanted to harmonize the user experience by giving employees simplified access to multiple systems and processes, including self-service processes such as HR, purchasing, and IT ticketing. It wished to provide managers with centralized access to relevant analytics for reporting and KPI tracking as well as approval workflows from different systems for approving purchase requisitions or leave requests. It hoped that integrating the relevant business applications would unify and enhance the employee experience. The company sought to establish an enterprise automation platform to drive process standardization and enable cross-system processes.
Chief Information Officer, PILLER Blowers & Compressors GmbH
Developing a modern intranet to harmonize workflows and interfaces
PILLER uses SAP S/4HANA, run as a two-tier model with SAP S/4HANA on-premise as its core system and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for its worldwide subsidiaries. The company also employs the SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Ariba, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Datasphere, and SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) solutions as well as SAP Fiori apps, among other software products.
PILLER implemented several suite qualities in SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). SAP Integration Suite and SAP Cloud Identity Access Governance software helped ensure connectivity between systems and applications as well as consistent security, identity, and access management across the SAP landscape. The authentication aspect draws on employee information from the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution.
To provide a central platform for integrating SAP solutions and third-party applications, data, and processes, the company chose SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition. The resulting state-of-the-art global intranet, known as “PILLER Work Zone,” is available to employees worldwide on any device. The digital hub gives employees centralized, role-specific access to daily tasks, information, analytics, and processes in a single place.
The company deployed SAP Build solutions using a fusion development approach to extend the capabilities of its intranet and increase the automation rate. It used the SAP Build Apps tool, with no-code capabilities, to quickly add tailor-made UI integration cards for specific requirements. It turned to SAP Build Code to add more-complex components that couldn’t be created using no-code tools – a clock widget, for example. It employed the SAP Build Process Automation solution to create custom-built workflows for company-specific processes, including visitor registration and management. Employees can now register a visitor, and if they desire to take them into restricted areas (such as production) that have additional safety requirements, the manager receives an access approval workflow. The prospective visitor gets an e-mail to acknowledge the relevant security guidelines and information to make the visit as smooth as possible. This includes parking details, a Wi-Fi password, and a QR code for registration. Everyone using PILLER Work Zone can see the details, and visitor tracking is also important in case of emergency. PILLER also uses SAP Build Process Automation and its embedded AI-based Document Information Extraction service to extract data from different sources and formats (structured data from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and unstructured data from PDFs).
projekt0708 provided consulting and implementation services to PILLER, bringing deep HR process know-how and technical expertise in the areas of SAP BTP, SAP Build, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP ERP HCM.
Chief Information Officer, PILLER Blowers & Compressors GmbH
Improving employee communication and reducing workload effort
The modern intranet hosts workspaces for internal target groups, such as employees, managers, and learners, driving specific content management in the area of human experience management. These customized zones help optimize the user experience and increase productivity by having one entry point to all relevant applications. For example, the home page features a comprehensive search function, company news and events, a location clock, and links to the most frequently used SAP cloud solutions. There are self-services that allow employees to submit leave requests and find team calendars, organizational charts, internal job openings, company agreements, and role-specific documents. Managers can access several KPIs and dashboards using the SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere solutions, showing on-time delivery rates for customer orders and revenue reports as well as approval workflows and important documents. The learning zone has training content from the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution.
Deskless workers now have access to the intranet, unlike before. They can use their own mobile devices in a secure and managed bring-your-own-device (BYOD) fashion. Information and workflow processes are presented in a simple mobile-ready way that resembles social media applications, and employees don’t, therefore, require any training to use the intranet.
The SAP Task Center service allowed the company to establish one inbox for its hybrid SAP solutions. Handling workflows in one inbox reduces the daily work effort as well as the approval time for leave requests, purchase orders, and expense reports, for example. Other benefits include improved communication that fosters a more-informed and engaged workforce and the increased use of analytics for strategic, data-driven decision-making. Enhanced timekeeping contributes to on-time delivery and efficiency while better visibility into delivery timelines strengthens operational control. And the increased use of SAP solutions improves business processes.
PILLER chose SAP BTP as a future-proof foundation for integration, automation, cross-architecture scenarios, and further process digitalization. The mix of low-code and no-code development approaches and pro-code solutions allows PILLER to deliver both simple and complex components and reduce development time and effort for new applications. Adopting a holistic and standardized integration strategy with the suite qualities has enabled a secure and streamlined user experience to promote efficiencies, which ultimately helps PILLER embrace new innovations. Harmonizing the various apps and solutions on mobile devices, as part of the clean-core and cloud-first strategy, helps reduce operating and support costs and maximize ROI. Also, IT staff are empowered to focus on more- strategic initiatives.
Chief Information Officer, PILLER Blowers & Compressors GmbH
Improving and expanding PILLER Work Zone to new departments and locations
PILLER would like to make UI improvements and add more scenarios by using SAP Build Apps to create new applications to meet specific requirements of departments such as sales and finance. The departments will then be able to create, edit, and modify their own workspaces and incorporate those applications accordingly. Further to expanding the Work Zone intranet, subsidiaries will also receive their own zones (workspaces) to better reach and serve their employees.
The business envisages new apps for employee onboarding. Depending on product availability, PILLER hopes to bring in the Joule copilot in SAP Build Code for AI code generation. This would increase developer productivity in SAP Build Code by automating routine and repetitive developer tasks, including the generation of business logic, sample data, or tests. It would help to speed up projects with context-aware, intelligent guidance such as “next best step” capabilities. It would also allow PILLER to explore scenarios to further simplify the interaction with IT systems by using natural language to generate reports or trigger processes.
PILLER would also like to add more approval processes with SAP Build Process Automation. For example, it’s currently looking at using process automatization to harmonize environmental, social, and governance data from different sources and formats for sustainability reporting. Once it extracts this data, PILLER can then import it into the SAP Datasphere solution for use in the SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution. Finally, the company is undertaking an ongoing project with SAP LeanIX solutions to improve infrastructure management and further streamline application and data integration.
Featured partner
Experts at innovative IT service and consulting company projekt0708 GmbH transform, digitalize, and automate HR processes with forward-looking HR and IT strategies. Using a deep understanding of SAP Build, SAP BTP, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP ERP HCM, the company was able to build a digital workplace with centralized access to SAP and third-party apps, processes, and data on any device, driving the productivity and engagement of end users.