KAESER KOMPRESSOREN: Empowering users with self-service business intelligence on a centralized global data management platform in the cloud
Explore KAESER KOMPRESSOREN’s journey with SAP
KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE provides compressed air products and related services worldwide. To enhance its operational efficiency and service excellence, the company wanted to upgrade its data management framework. It used SAP BW bridge for SAP Datasphere and the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to enable a scalable and flexible cloud-based system landscape.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Coburg, Germany | 7,500 employees |
users of self-service planning and analytics capabilities.
stories and insights built in SAP Analytics Cloud.
database objects deployed in SAP Datasphere.
Chief Information Officer, KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE
Scaling up data management and cloud capabilities
For more than 100 years, KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE has developed compressed air systems for the manufacturing industry as well as construction, healthcare, and environmental services. Not only does it build compressors, but it also produces everything from mobile compressor units to complex industry-sized compressed air stations containing dozens of components. The company is especially proud of its air-as-a-service offering, where it builds, runs, and maintains a compressed air station at a customer’s site, charging only for the compressed air it delivers.
KAESER builds long-term relationships with its customers by accompanying them through the complete journey, from the purchasing process to servicing and upgrades. Established and headquartered in Coburg, Germany, the company remains in the hands of the same founding family and still produces exclusively in its native country. It supports dynamic production environments with demand-oriented, digital services in line with Industry 4.0.
Before implementing a cloud solution, KAESER used a data management system that supported the whole company, which comprises more than 100 business units and 50 subsidiaries worldwide. The database was centrally administered from the headquarters, but there was a lack of IT resources to maintain a large and complex system landscape. While functional, the system didn’t provide the desired level of scalability and cloud compatibility that KAESER aimed for in its operations. The business wanted to optimize these features so that it could better adapt to its evolving needs.
Chief Information Officer, KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE
Providing a bridge to create data management in the cloud
KAESER KOMPRESSOREN has maintained a strong relationship with SAP for more than 30 years. The compressor company uses SAP software almost exclusively, including applications for ERP and warehouse management. Following gradual upgrades of the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application, KAESER migrated to the SAP BW/4HANA solution before replacing it with the SAP Datasphere solution. This enabled a central data warehouse for strategic reporting. Rather than creating its database from scratch, the business employed the SAP BW bridge for SAP Datasphere to transfer the information.
The company relies on the SAP Analytics Cloud solution for its business intelligence, reporting, and planning capabilities. Between 500 and 600 users worldwide look to the solution daily to gain insights into ever-changing customer data. Financial planning is now conducted with SAP Analytics Cloud, and there’s a project to implement integrated business planning, with scope for demand planning on the logistics side and possibly for sales planning in the future. A central team is responsible for reporting and analytics based on requests from the business globally, while the controlling department is beginning to build up its own stories and insights in SAP Analytics Cloud. KAESER is also embracing AI by using SAP Analytics Cloud and the SAP Master Data Governance application to predict inactive customers or materials in its ERP system (SAP S/4HANA).
The business used SAP Services and Support to implement SAP Datasphere and SAP BW bridge, including general architecture, design, SQL-code delivery, and customer enablement. As SAP Datasphere Project Lead Dirk Fischer explains, “It was all totally new for us, and we had assistance from consultants and development angels from SAP, which was incredibly helpful. SAP Datasphere allows us to be more self-reliant than before.”
SAP Datasphere Project Lead, KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE
Enabling self-service analytics and data democratization
While KAESER was previously unable to combine content from cloud-based software, it can now bring on board data from SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, and other solutions from SAP and Qualtrics, as well as third-party applications. It has delivered data harmonization and transparency with a central platform.
The company also has more flexibility in customizing reports and assimilating different types of information in dashboards, charts, and tables. With self-service analytics and data democratization, KAESER can enable its business units to create their own reports, instead of relying on a central function. This isn’t restricted to the front-end data-presentation capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud, but also includes back-end data modeling in SAP Datasphere. A pilot project with the controlling department allows it to build its own data models and join sales and purchasing data, for example, to gain new insights.
Given that 60 to 70 employees in the central IT department at Coburg manage the worldwide subsidiaries, the business hopes to save money by implementing cloud-based systems that have a lower cost of maintenance. KAESER has created a competitive advantage by transitioning its IT landscape to the cloud and being able to adopt future innovations from SAP.
Chief Information Officer, KAESER KOMPRESSOREN SE
Rolling out the cloud-based data management landscape
In the future, KAESER is considering replacing its IoT access layer architecture with SAP Datasphere and reimplementing its pipelines to the SAP Data Intelligence solution within the unified cloud data warehouse. The company has many other SAP software projects running simultaneously. Its largest project, the migration of SAP S/4HANA (on premise) and 10 connected systems to the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution, has recently been completed after a runtime of only six months.
In the short term, KAESER would like to expand the pilot program with its controlling department, enabling it to take advantage of both SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere. With prior experience creating queries and reports by themselves, the controlling team can become more self-sufficient by using these solutions to do their own data modeling. The long-term vision is to establish self-service business intelligence capabilities for most business units. KAESER would like to enable its business units to conduct analysis with the IT team initially and on their own over time. This will help KAESER attain its ultimate long-term data strategy goal to become a data-driven company.