Challenge: Limited access to information
The owner of the companies of the Feddersen Group is K.D. Feddersen Holding GmbH. The sole shareholder of K.D. Feddersen Holding GmbH is the non-profit K.D. Feddersen Foundation. The companies of the group worked with various ERP and financial accounting systems. As a result, a lot of information was only recorded for specific departments or subsidiaries. Additionally, many different systems and isolated applications existed, limiting the availability of important information for the subsidiaries and the holding company.
The main objective of a uniform and company-wide information and document management system was to create maximum transparency for the subsidiaries and the holding company. Another important goal was to promote cooperation in order to avoid redundancies, exploit synergies and increase the performance of the entire corporate group.
Audit-proof archiving and new development of a middleware
Today, the Feddersen Group pursues a cloud-first strategy. In the context of company-wide digitisation, it has issued the goal that business-critical information must be archived completely, legally compliant and transparently. Due to the growth of the Group, emphasis is placed on scalability and the rapid implementation of continuously changing business requirements.
One challenge was the new development of a middleware to integrate the different ERP systems INTEGRA and Infor COM. Master and transaction data as well as outgoing ERP documents (such as order confirmations and invoices) are transferred and stored in customer, supplier, offer and order files. At one of the subsidiaries, quotations are not created via the ERP, but in a user-friendly way via the document management system. Here, the ERP data is available via the middleware in real time for efficient data entry.
Digital product file and workflows
A product file in which all product-related data and documents are stored has also been implemented at this subsidiary. The file solutions are supplemented by workflows, e.g. for offer release and approval, onboarding by external users or the release of data sheets in the product file. And there are already plans for follow-up projects. One is the conversion of the existing business applications for contract and quality management as well as incoming invoice processing, which are still based on SharePoint 2016/2019, to SharePoint Online and thus to Microsoft 365.