Linde Gas
Linde Gas Handles Peak Loads of More Than 15,000 Jobs with UC4
"We especially liked the flexibility and wide range of functions in UC4. In addition to much faster job planning, the system now helps us eliminate manual errors and find ways to significantly reduce costs."
Sebastian Ascherl, IT Architect for Linde Gas
Customer Snapshot
Company: Linde Gas
Business/Industry: Chemical industry, industrial gases
Company Headquarters: Pullach (near Munich), Germany
Presence: International
Webpage: www.linde-gas.de
Technical Environment: 9 Unix AIX 5.3 servers, Oracle 9.2 on IBM machines, 5 SAP R/3 4.7 Unicode systems, 3 Business Warehouse systems and Enterprise Portal, Windows servers
The Company
Linde Gas is part of the Gas business segment of Linde AG. The company has major operations throughout the world and is a leading provider of industrial gases in Germany and Europe. In Germany, Linde Gas employs approximately 3,500 people and achieved sales of 946 million euro in year 2005. To serve its 180,000 customers in Germany, the company maintains a dense network of production and sales sites capable of providing the right solution for every need – from disposable one-liter cylinders to 75,000-liter tanks.
The Challenge
At Linde Gas, providing comprehensive customer service is a philosophy and way of life. But to keep pace with elevated requirements, the company recently embarked on a mammoth project to upgrade its IT resources. As early as 2002, they began converting globally distributed SAP solutions at 41 production sites into a large system for Central Europe. At the same time, processes were analyzed and restructured in order to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of customer and enterprise data and related procedures.
Unfortunately, the greater transparency and improved customer service afforded by a single, shared system came at the cost of significantly more work for system administrators. Exchanging extensive volumes of data with legacy systems and handling route-planning and gas-cylinder administration systems only added to their responsibilities. As the number of jobs dramatically increased, the internal SAP application scheduler simply couldn't keep pace. "Job planning was extremely difficult," remembers Thomas Steinich. "SAP solutions don't provide a flexible way to reschedule," according to Steinich at Linde Gas' SAP Customer Competence Center.
In their search for alternatives, Thomas Steinich and his colleagues did some research on the Internet: "When you know exactly which functions you want, the Internet is always the fastest and easiest way to find information. We took a look at several different providers, paying special attention to product functionality and reference customers."
The Solution
Their search led them to UC4 Software and they soon decided to evaluate the UC4 platform internally. Managers at Linde Gas were impressed with the extensive features, flexibility, and the ease of adapting jobs. The decision to switch to the UC4 platform had been reached! By the end of August 2006, after just three months of implementation, Linde Gas was ready to switch from test to production operation. The transition was a huge success and today the company can handle even peak loads of more than 15,000 jobs.
Overall control of the system is also much easier and more secure than before. "The large number of procedures used to make it a real challenge to avoid mixing up daily, weekly, and monthly jobs", recalls Sebastian Ascherl, IT Architect responsible for the UC4 platform at Linde Gas. Process chains rarely forgive mistakes, but unfortunately it was not uncommon for Linde Gas to have an error rate of about one percent. "Now all we have to do is write the scripts in the UC4 platform and automate planning of the jobs. For me, that is one of the most important benefits of the new job scheduling software."
Interrelated linking of jobs in the UC4 platform also helped the gas supplier significantly reduce costs. When generating invoices for leased gas containers, for example, Linde Gas uses a six-stage job chain that saves a total of 240 minutes on the individual jobs. "We can produce finished invoices four hours earlier than before. That means customers receive their invoices one day earlier and we receive payment faster", explains Thomas Steinich. The potential for increased revenue is tremendous, since the company sends about 100,000 invoices every month in Germany alone.
Return on investment is a commonly used reference value, but unfortunately only rarely quantifiable. At Linde Gas, ROI is clearly defined. Savings are expected to be 22,000 euro in 2006 and significantly more in the following year, since by then they also expect to save 12,000 euro in administrative costs during maintenance, 14,000 euro during monthly invoicing, and 18,000 euro in the generation of job chains in each country. During the expansion phase, remaining processes will be analyzed and possibly administered by the UC4 platform. Moving forward, foreign subsidiaries currently converting to the new enterprise system are also expected to handle jobs with the UC4 platform.
UC4 Benefits
- Replacement of the internal SAP application scheduler
- Inclusion of all platforms, even legacy systems
- Invoices created faster and ROI clearly defined
- Much faster planning and re-planning of jobs
- Automation of jobs avoids manual errors
- Integration of EDI format conversion and other tasks
