Initial Situation

The BERNER Group was founded by Albert Berner in 1957. Today, almost 70 years later, the one-man business has grown into an international group with more than 8,000 employees. The family-owned company is the leading B2B specialist and innovative manufacturer of chemical products. In addition, the BERNER Group supplies over 100,000 premium products for repair, care and maintenance to customers in the mobility, construction and industrial sectors. With its strong brands BERNER, BTI by BERNER and Caramba, the group also offers industry-leading services that enable BERNER customers to focus on their customers and drive their business forward.

Over the years, a heterogeneous SAP landscape based on SAP ERP ECC6 has grown at BERNER locations in more than 20 European countries. Many steps in the master data maintenance process had to be performed manually by internal employees or external service providers. The group wanted to fundamentally change this and at the same time migrate to SAP's modern S/4HANA platform.

The Task

At the heart of the project was the group-wide migration from ERP ECC6 to S/4HANA. As with almost every leading retail company with numerous subsidiaries, standardized, secure and efficient processes are a must. This applies in particular to the creation, processing and maintenance of master data.

The BERNER Group therefore decided to fundamentally optimize and standardize its existing master data maintenance process. In order to be optimally prepared, the master data had to be migrated in a streamlined manner, time-consuming manual process steps had to be automated, and the creation and maintenance of data had to be made cleaner and more secure. The SAP solutions had to cover the complex logics of the BERNER Group, integrate directly with S/4HANA and, of course, work seamlessly with each other.

In order to find the right partner for this challenging project for the entire group of companies, the BERNER Group carried out a selection process in which ISO Professional Services GmbH successfully prevailed.

The Project

The BERNER Group commissioned ISO Professional Services GmbH (IPS) to introduce the Master Data Governance process. For this purpose, central applications of the Marlin Suite from IPS were to be implemented:

• Marlin Data Governance Business Partner
• Marlin Duplicate Check
• Marlin Address Validation
• Marlin UST-ID Validation
• Marlin Content Enrichment
• Marlin Compliance Screening

The new master data maintenance process and the Marlin applications will initially only be implemented on the S/4HANA system. BERNER's ERP ECC6 system, which will run in parallel for a transition period, will continue to communicate with the new S/4HANA system for the time being. However, a shutdown of the ECC6 system is already planned. As soon as this is the case, nothing will stand in the way of the full use of the Marlin applications that have been introduced.

Running the old ECC6 system in parallel with S/4HANA was initially a challenge. Over the years, numerous special cases had been introduced in the old system that were not immediately compatible with the new system. The BERNER project team first had to ensure that communication between the two systems was fast and error-free.

Once this was guaranteed, the IPS team began integrating the Marlin tools directly into SAP S/4HANA. This made it possible to view ongoing processes without having to jump to other tools. Master data is now identified and enriched with characteristics as it is created. An extension of this functionality is planned for the future.

The Results

The old ERP ECC6 and the new S/4HANA system now run in parallel without any problems. The ordered Marlin tools have been integrated and are in use. As a result, the steps that used to be carried out partly in-house and partly by external service providers have been automated. The Marlin Suite applications are used at all BERNER Group sites, ensuring a standardized master data governance process.

The Outlook

The project is currently in a transition phase from ERP ECC6 to S/4HANA. Once the old ECC6 system is shut down, full functionality of all Marlin Suite solutions will be guaranteed. The customer also showed interest in the new Marlin Content Risk application, an add-on to the existing Marlin Content product. By connecting to the data provider D&B, Marlin Content Risk will also be able to use credit information for credit management in the future. The hierarchy of the checked company is stored with the master data record. When a new record is created with a match from the database, Marlin Content Risk displays an existing hierarchy and highlights previously created master records in the family tree.