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Standardized processes and IT in sales across Europe

The Information Management Group (IMG) is supporting the required integration of MAN's sales processes in a new Europe-wide IT architecture and, with its coaching, is laying the foundation for the conception, customization and further development of the ESA project.

In February 2003, MAN Nutzfahrzeuge started its ESA (Europäische Strukturen in der Außenorganisation) project in order to respond to the increasingly tougher competition.
Its objective was to create a unified and multilingual centralized system for all staff in the field organisation and, therefore, to increase transparency and improve profitability. Previously, staff in the 17 European countries where MAN has a presence used partly outdated, heterogeneous solutions which no longer met their requirements. The processes of the individual departments and countries will now be integrated through ESA. This will also involve overcoming language barriers, making relevant data accessible to the whole organisation and ensuring that the IT systems are compatible.

One of the responsibilities of the international management consultancy IMG is to coach ESA sales, which represents one of the largest parts of the ESA project. Such coaching should improve customer satisfaction and strengthen the company's market position. MAN's sales staff in 17 countries across Europe now have access to all customer and vehicle data. Each sales office therefore has access to all the product information, from new vehicles and used vehicles through to contract and marketing data.

Strong demands on the project team

For the pilot roll-out in Austria, a 30 person project team, consisting of MAN employees and IMG consultants, developed a template. The new system enables country-specific vehicle data to be generated and covers all the sales activities from contact registration for someone interested in a HGV through to configuration, offer generation and order processing and beyond to a "second sale" as a used vehicle. Following the successful go-live in Austria and the implementation in Germany, the next roll-out for Switzerland got underway. The translation of French and Italian system text which was needed for Switzerland was completed by IMG.

Complex process integration and system topography

The integration of the complex MAN sales system that had been partly used until then and the bi-directional integration of MAN's manufacturing system AVIS presented further challenges for the project team. To this end, IMG provided active consultancy and development activities, in addition to the coaching. The extensive CRM module, MAN's own configurator for new vehicles and the SAP IPC configurator for used vehicles and MAN's vehicle data maintenance tool were integrated on the SAP platform.

"This integration was made possible with the new integration platform SAP NetWeaver. In particular the XI component enabled us to achieve deep integration of the individual parts of the system, taking us to a new performance dimension" explains Wolfgang Faßbender, IMG project manager with MAN ESA-V. In addition, the IMG consultants also developed - with NetWeaver's web application server (WAS) component - the prototype for an internet search engine that could offer end users online access to the used vehicles on the ESA system. With NetWeaver, IMG succeeded in integrating SAP R/3-VMS seamlessly with the surrounding systems.

The objectives were met

Johann Geißler, overall project leader of the MAN Nutzfahrzeuge Group, explains "Without the structured coaching of IMG and its profound know-how on all levels of consultancy and implementation, we would not have succeeded in creating such a highly networked IT system and process integration with the vehicle sales area."

Man Nutzfahrzeuge Group is happy with the results of the ESA-V sub-project. All the objectives were met despite new challenges cropping up in between. The innovative ESA-V solutions could flow into other sub-projects and can be applied to other challenges. "The users have become familiar with the new SAP solution very quickly and benefit from the optimized processes and the greater transparency", concludes Johann Geißler.