Daimler Truck: Reducing IT developers’ manual load by automating translation of a new ERP interface
Helping teams add value to the business
During an ERP transformation, Daimler Truck needed to free developers from time-consuming translation of custom objects. With the SAP Translation Hub application, it slashed manual effort and saved developer time, speedily producing reliable translations that help make its new ERP solution accessible to diverse users.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Automotive | Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Germany | >100,000 employees |
days to translate around 25,000 custom objects.
reduction in translation time.
translation errors reported in six months.
Solution Architect, Daimler Truck Innovation Center India, part of Daimler Truck AG
Translating a huge volume of custom objects
One of the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturers, Daimler Truck AG is a truly global enterprise. Running more than 40 production sites in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, the company also has sales and service locations in most countries of the world. With its innovative trucks and buses, including the Freightliner, Thomas Built Buses, Western Star, Mercedes-Benz, FUSO, BharatBenz, RIZON, and Setra brands, the company has one goal: “work for all who keep the world moving.” This also involves providing digital services that help make customers’ daily work easier, more efficient, safer, and more comfortable.
To support this business, Daimler Truck runs a hybrid IT environment comprising on-premises and cloud software. It aimed to enhance the security, scalability, and flexibility of this landscape by moving to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition through the RISE with SAP journey. This transition would help the company better adapt to changing business requirements and innovate its technology.
While implementing this new ERP solution, the company faced a massive translation challenge. It needed to translate more than 855 packages containing around 25,000 custom objects for the new user interface from English to German. Doing this by hand would take around three minutes for each short text, requiring a gigantic 1,250 hours of developers’ time.
Vara Prasad Thatikonda is a solutions architect at Daimler Truck Innovation Center India. He explains, “Manually translating and copying these custom objects one by one would waste significant effort and require us to hire more developers. We wanted to minimize manual intervention and automate the translation process as much as possible, freeing our developers to focus on more value-added work.”
Solution Architect, Daimler Truck Innovation Center India, part of Daimler Truck AG
Deploying a flexible, AI-enabled translation application
Faced with this mammoth translation task, Daimler Truck turned once again to SAP software. The company believed SAP Translation Hub, which runs on SAP Business Technology Platform, could help make the ERP interface accessible to diverse users while satisfying its needs for both accuracy and data privacy.
A successful proof of concept confirmed that the application’s functionality for projects in the ABAP programming language could help translate short texts in ABAP speedily and efficiently. The company could also use the software translation file project offering for use cases such as translating customized entries. And in the future, it could use document translation functionality to translate German-language functional specifications or business requirements documentation into English.
The application’s flexibility was a huge selling point, enabling the company to translate based on object lists or transport requests in ABAP. This flexibility applied not just to objects but also to applications based on the SAP Fiori user experience.
Vara Prasad Thatikonda says, “Our project was a typical one with different packages. With SAP Translation Hub, we could translate based on object lists containing up to 3,000 items, but we could also translate based on transport requests. So, there were multiple options for translation, which was another plus point.”
Producing high-quality translations with minimal human intervention
Thanks to SAP Translation Hub, two of Daimler Truck’s developers were able to automatically translate all 25,000 custom objects in just 20 days in time for the ERP go-live. This freed them from an estimated 1,250 hours of manual work, allowing them to devote themselves to more-useful tasks. And they achieved this without needing to call on business colleagues for support, reducing work for those users too.
As well as time and money savings, Vara Prasad Thatikonda values the accuracy of the translations. “Six months after going live with all these objects, we have yet to receive an error report. Not one person has raised an issue with the translated text, and we expect this to continue.”
Vara Prasad Thatikonda describes some features that have proven particularly useful. “The translation quality index is probably our favorite feature. We also like that the application lets us filter each translated object by various categories and that multiple users can simultaneously translate different objects within the same system. Another useful aspect is that the application recognizes already translated objects, which further reduces costs.”
On the last feature, where a translation already exists for text in the system, it is displayed in the UI as “translation provider ABAP” without a quality index. If this translation needs to be reworked, the team can intuitively amend it in the UI. Where no translation exists, the system checks additional translation providers for existing human-reviewed translations, starting with the company’s multilingual text repository. It then checks SAP’s multilingual text repository, which is based on SAP HANA and contains UI translations provided by language specialists and official SAP software terminology entries. Where no match exists in these translation providers, the application translates the text using AI.
Rolling out the application and investigating new functionality
After a successful go-live in the German market, Vara Prasad Thatikonda’s team now plans to roll out SAP Translation Hub to other markets, initially across Europe. It is also exploring the different features the application has to offer.
A recent proof of concept involved translating standard master-data tables into German. Another investigated the use of document translation functionality to translate German-language functional specifications into English.
Just as Daimler Truck’s digital services improve its customers’ processes and productivity, SAP Translation Hub is enabling its own employees to work smarter, helping them and the enterprise on the road to success.