Future-proof SAP cloud platform with SAP S/4HANA

The KTP 720X from Romaco Kilian, a tablet press for the pharmaceutical industry, weighs more than five tons, operates with six bar of compressed air, has a drive power of 38 kW, and can press more than one million tablets in an hour. The machine cools the processing area to below 30 °C so that it can also process heat-sensitive products such as the painkiller ibuprofen.

It is with products like the KTP 720X that Romaco Kilian has, over the past decades, earned an outstanding reputation as a technology leader in special machine engineering for the pharmaceutical industry. The company’s many patents are also testament to its approach of developing and bringing to market the best possible solutions for its discerning customers around the world.

For a highly technical company like Romaco Kilian, a powerful IT system landscape is essential. It is the key to maximizing competitiveness and simplifying business processes, as well as, for example, enabling the integrated mapping of customer order production with variant configuration of the different products and solutions.

Given the fact that the existing SAP ECC 6.0 system was nearing the end of maintenance, the company’s decision makers wanted to find out how they could replace their existing, highly customized SAP solution with a greenfield SAP S/4HANA implementation and, at the same time, greatly simplify their IT landscape. “As a pilot project, the project at Romaco Kilian naturally had considerable significance for the international Romaco Group as a whole,” explains Markus Kimpel, Romaco Group CFO.

The company therefore instructed GAMBIT to complete a preliminary project for SAP S/4HANA as well as a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA, as was clearly indicated by the insights and results from the preliminary project. With a greenfield approach, a new system is set up from scratch.

The main goals of the project were to simplify processes, overcome or eliminate inherited problems from the legacy SAP system, and more closely integrate quotation management and object dependencies from design and manufacturing. “The company wanted to go back to the standard, relying primarily on SAP Best Practices – in other words, preconfigured, integrated, and immediately available business processes,” explains Dr. Thomas Fischer of GAMBIT Consulting, who was responsible for steering the project.

Completed using SAP Activate methodology, the SAP S/4HANA implementation project had a broad procedural and technological scope; from development and sales order entry including variant configuration through to production and after-sales business (service, spare parts, conversions, and retrofits).

Another key part of the project was change management: developing a shared understanding of the purpose and necessity of the SAP S/4HANA project and preparing the Kilian organization for implementation.

“A particular highlight of the project for me was that we replaced the order database, which had previously been maintained manually, with digital documentation of the individual machines in SAP S/4HANA (a ‘digital twin’) – in other words, a virtual replica of the physical assets,” says Achim Krämer, project manager at GAMBIT Consulting. And Romaco Kilian is already planning further expansion stages of the ‘twin’; namely, the continuous digital documentation of changes resulting from rebuilds and service measures.

Jens Carstens, Managing Director of Romaco Kilian: “Overall, we did move a little slower during the pandemic than originally planned, but that was for many reasons, including some changes in our project organization. Nevertheless, thanks to the good and professional cooperation of the entire team, we achieved all our project goals, enjoyed a smooth go-live at the beginning of 2022, and are now implementing follow-up projects with GAMBIT.”