"The international collaboration of our group of companies is 100 percent dependent on IT. i-doit enables us to maintain and provide all relevant information centrally."
CIO René Sieben
VON ARDENNE develops and manufactures systems for the industrial vacuum coating of materials such as glass, wafers, metal strip or plastic film. Depending on the application, these coatings are one nanometer to a few micrometers thin and give the materials new functional properties.
The company's customers use these materials to manufacture high-quality products such as architectural glass, displays for smartphones and touchscreens, solar modules or heat protection films for car glazing.
Customers are offered technologically advanced vacuum coating systems, comprehensive expertise and worldwide service. The key components are developed and manufactured by VON ARDENNE itself. Systems and components from VON ARDENNE make an important contribution to protecting the environment. They are crucial in the manufacture of products that help to consume less energy or generate energy from renewable resources.
Organization: Von Ardenne
Industry: Vacuum coating technology
Locations: 7 in Europe, Asia, North America
Employees: 1,300 worldwide
Coating systems: over 550 in 50 countries
Subsidiaries and production facilities in Asia and the United States require a high degree of networking, mature IT management processes and a high level of security. The subsidiaries, which are in themselves independent, are managed from Dresden in terms of IT. The IT service management of the entire group is also planned, implemented and continuously improved at the Dresden headquarters.
Application example: SAP interface
As in many organizations of this size, SAP is the first choice for mapping the company's core processes. However, a single posting line in SAP can mean a lot of work in IT. If a simple booking record comes from central asset accounting, the life cycle of often a good dozen servers, 100 workstations or even software license quotas begins in IT.
One of the challenges in the i-doit community is to merge the purchasing and accounting processes with those of IT asset management in terms of data technology. Here is the solution from this lighthouse project: i-doit represents the "point of truth". Data supplied from the satellite systems and upstream processes is collected, processed, transferred to i-doit and linked here with other documentation data. The aim is always to have to make an entry only once if possible and to ensure that the data is up-to-date in all systems.
This also applies to booking data from SAP, which is stored in IDoc files. Using middleware developed in-house, these data records are retrieved and prepared for the i-doit import via API. A separate object type, SAP assets, was created for this purpose. After the import, a special status message informs the IT team that their work can begin: Documentation objects are now linked to the SAP posting. All documentation work is carried out directly in i-doit. This creates the corresponding number of linked and therefore easily analyzable IT assets from the one booking line. The data records of the assets are now also assigned to those of the users, the responsible persons, the warehouse or the branch offices.
Corresponding workstations, rack spaces, rooms, IT services and maintenance contracts are also linked relationally. The template function enables the use of default values. The list editor can be used to make mass changes to a group of objects. In the further life cycle of the IT assets now in i-doit, the question always arises as to whether the data is reliably maintained and changes are also documented in the data status. In order to make this traceable and easy to check, a sophisticated reporting system was created. This also has some special features and is based on extensive practical experience.
For example, recipients of the report can easily distinguish new, changed and deleted data from that of the last report period thanks to color highlighting. Using drill-down - starting from the SAP posting - all movements and changes can be traced back to the individual linked data records, checked and used for further purposes.
"This approach and the implementation of the SAP interface using the i-doit API significantly reduce our inventory workload and have created a level of transparency across our IT assets that was previously unavailable,"
summarizes René Sieben.
This end-to-end control of data, the complete documentation in IT operations, is the level that VON ARDENNE strives for, as exemplified in production operations: High precision, accuracy and diligence, of which we can be justifiably proud!
Maintaining an overview of the IT assets used worldwide is challenging, but forms the basis for control processes and projects. i-doit has mastered this task perfectly since the first day of use two years ago.
"The standard configuration and the structure provided by i-doit made it easy for us to transition from all the decentralized solutions we had previously used. Initially, no adjustments to the software were necessary. As a pilot project, SIM card management was set up within a few weeks,"
explains René Sieben.
What sounds simple is far from trivial: dual SIM phones, different regional regulations for private and business use, different providers and contracts as well as the usual staff turnover at companies of this size entail a lot of administrative work. This has absolutely nothing to do with the value of the managed objects - the actual SIM card or its electronic counterpart.
High security requirements simply demand stringent processes. The company's own adaptations to i-doit based on the customization functions it contains were added in further projects:
"We had to come up with some ideas for our special situation of a decentralized organization with central control. We decided to give several companies a shared view of the IT components in i-doit, finely controlled by the customizable authorization system. i-doit supported us well with its flexibility and even surprised us in places, so that we were able to implement our requirements without having to develop them ourselves or use additional software."
When introducing i-doit, it is important not to try to implement too much at once. However, it is essential to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with the system. The effort required for data maintenance should not be underestimated. The decisive factor for the acceptance of a system such as i-doit is a feasible project scope (in the form of several phases or several delimited projects). In order to derive the greatest possible benefit from a system such as i-doit, all key users must be convinced that this software supports their daily work. Good data quality can only be achieved if users have a positive attitude towards a system like i-doit. And that is crucial.