Until 2016, customer service at HANSA-FLEX was largely manual. You can imagine what that meant: In addition to administrative work, the team had to contend with a high error rate. For example, it often happened that customers were unable to decipher handwritten reports or that it was not clear from the deployment planning which technician was currently at which location and which customer they were going to next.

This is why HANSA-FLEX decided to digitalize its entire service fleet – quite a challenge with over 4,000 employees in 450 branches worldwide. The company wanted to make its service fit for Industry 4.0, streamline its processes and minimize errors. The central requirement was deep integration into the SAP system, which HANSA-FLEX operates as the leading system where all the threads come together. In addition, there were various requirements from the individual service areas. These include, for example, ensuring and constantly monitoring the safety of employees on construction sites. All related information must be entered into the SAP system so that it can be collected centrally and later analyzed and evaluated.

In view of these special requirements, the Bremen-based system provider was looking for an SAP partner with a high degree of specialization in service management. In addition to industry knowledge and know-how, experience with the various SAP components is essential for a project of this size. HANSA-FLEX therefore opted for Axians NEO Solutions and Technology GmbH, which has proven service management specialization in the SAP area.

In collaboration with Axians, a holistic solution was created for the digitalization of HANSA-FLEX’s end-to-end customer service process. Due to the decentralized HANSA-FLEX structures, an agile project approach was chosen. Project goals and timings were continuously defined, monitored and, if necessary, adjusted in close cooperation. The overall solution consists of four SAP solutions and two proprietary Axians solutions that digitally map the customer service process in an integrated and end-to-end manner. These include the SAP solutions SAP Service Cloud, SAP ERP, SAP MRS and SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) as well as Axians’ own NEO Mobile Suite Multiplatform solutions. SAP Service Cloud is used to manage customer inquiries and fault reports, while HANSA-FLEX uses SAP MRS to plan the subsequent deployment of service technicians. The technician on site uses the mobile assistant, the NEO Mobile Suite, while the accompanying processes, such as spare parts management and billing, are mapped in SAP ERP.

One particular project detail is the customized technician workflow. To this end, the Axians NEO experts took a detailed look at the day-to-day work of the technicians to find out what their colleagues need and how their work can be made easier. When the NEO Mobile Suite was introduced, the HANSA-FLEX technicians were slowly introduced to the new solution to ensure a high level of user acceptance. They now benefit from a streamlined application that is easy and intuitive to use. And the difficulties of deciphering reports are a thing of the past. Reports are generated automatically so that the customer can also store documents centrally and digitally and access them at any time.

HANSA-FLEX is very satisfied with the collaboration and is therefore planning further SAP projects with Axians. As part of the digitization project, the national companies in France and Luxembourg as well as the UK and Dubai were connected. Axians is also currently supporting HANSA-FLEX AG with the migration of the existing solution to the S/4HANA world. The solution is now also being used in the Netherlands, Ireland, Poland, Switzerland and Austria.