Freudenberg: Proving the value of empowering business process experts to build low-code solutions at scale
Explore Freudenberg’s low-code journey with SAP
Known for its technological expertise and innovative strength, Freudenberg Group offers a diversified range of solutions in 56 countries. Seeking to shore up the continuous expansion and renewal of its portfolio of products and services, the company adopted SAP Build solutions to enable its expert business users to develop solutions at scale, without writing code.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Chemicals | Weinheim, Germany | 51,462 employees |
increase in user adoption expected within one year.
active citizen developers expected in one year.
Head of Corporate Digital Business Innovation, Freudenberg SE
Scaling digital development more securely with low-code innovation
Freudenberg Group is guided by its mission to sustainably shape the future through efficient, increasingly digitalized processes, resource-saving products, and sophisticated services. Managing a group of 457 companies located in 56 countries, the Freudenberg name is synonymous with technological expertise and innovation strength as well as strong customer orientation and collaboration. Across the globe, its creative and high-quality technical solutions are found in thousands of demanding applications from cars to power plant turbines, men’s jackets, and cleaning robots.
Constantly questioning how the business can improve to react flexibly to new conditions is part of Freudenberg’s operating ethos. This led it to explore new ways for its talented team to bring ideas to life, harnessing the speed and efficiency of low-code tools. Simon Jarke, Freudenberg’s head of corporate digital business innovation, explains, “The reality in many large organizations is that it’s really difficult for people with innovative ideas to get them built. We wanted to find a way of making the process of innovating and building digital tools more democratic and enjoyable.”
Head of Corporate Digital Business Innovation, Freudenberg SE
Empowering business users to be hands-on with creating apps and automations
Freudenberg’s commitment to excellence, reliability, and proactive, responsible action has run deep as part of its core values since 1849. As a longtime user of SAP solutions and looking to simplify digital transformation, Freudenberg was interested in adopting SAP Build solutions on SAP Business Technology Platform. Designed for expert users who don’t code for a living, this family of low-code, no-code solutions enables citizen developers to create sophisticated apps, design digital workspaces, and automate tedious work using visual drag-and-drop tools.
To immerse its people in these solutions, Freudenberg sought help from SAP. “We wanted experts from SAP to show us how to get started using SAP Build so our team could gain firsthand knowledge to start creating apps right away,” comments Katja Nawrath, business architect, digital transformation and innovation, at Freudenberg.
The team from SAP conceived and hosted a buildathon workshop to introduce the tools and provide hands-on building time and coaching oversight. Much like a hackathon but without coding, the two-day buildathon allowed a group of Freudenberg’s citizen developers to explore the SAP Build Apps tool and the SAP Build Process Automation solution. They gained firsthand experience in developing their own simplified apps and automating processes as well as ideating the use cases they will build in the future.
Head of Corporate Digital Business Innovation, Freudenberg SE
Harnessing domain expertise to rapidly build and augment digital solutions
Freudenberg has long been seen as an enterprise of entrepreneurs. With the buildathon successfully bringing together business users from across the business to build apps and automated workflows to solve complex tasks, the company can now be seen as an enterprise of citizen developers as well.
The company established a new low-code center of excellence called the Confactory, where its business users have direct and more-secure access to SAP Build solutions as well as enterprise-wide processes and data. This allows them to use visual development tools to build digital solutions to solve specific challenges themselves without needing a development team.
Nawrath comments, “We’ve enabled our business users as citizen developers. With their deep understanding of specific process challenges and transformation requirements, they can now create and augment enterprise applications and automate processes with the simplicity of drag-and-drop visual tools. We only need to provide them with the data sources and APIs, and they can build processes on their own.”
In terms of identifying use cases, Jarke sees great potential in optimizing the area of collaboration between business groups. “In many cases, as paper is still being sent back and forth between entities, there is a huge opportunity for using no-code tooling to implement digital processes for speed and efficiency.”
Business Architect, Digital Transformation and Innovation, Freudenberg SE
Generating ongoing value from a low-code center of excellence
Thanks to the success of the first buildathon workshop, Freudenberg is committed to holding more hands-on learning sessions focused on the capabilities of the solutions, after which it will encourage its team to start their own projects.
In terms of identifying use cases for SAP Build, Freudenberg is now evaluating a range of internal processes and assessing how much time is spent executing them manually to determine which ones will be prioritized for automation. The company is also identifying processes that are particularly complex and can lead to human error, with a goal of automating the most error prone.
Nawrath explains, “In the past, we couldn’t automate all our manual processes because of the cost attached to the development team. Now that our business users can develop apps on their own, we’ve eliminated that cost so we can prioritize transforming processes that are time intensive or can cause confusion.”