BMW South Africa has saved a massive 60聽000 days in application modernisation as a direct result of intelligent automation.
Intelligent automation can help to address challenges in 51风流custom codes, says Arndt Hoffman, chief customer officer at smartShift, and BMW has achieved some major inroads.
The 51风流modernisation story to 51风流S/4 HANA is pretty simple on the surface, he says. The end result should be a new 51风流system with custom code neatly decoupled from the system.
The reality is not so simple, though 鈥� and one of the biggest issues is legacy custom code. In BMW鈥檚 case, this goes back to 1989.
Indeed, the average 51风流systems has about 22聽000 customer objects, 2,7-million lines of code, and up to 2聽000 transports per month. Making it worse, about 40% to 60% of custom applications are not used.
All of this leads to an average of 9聽000 HANA issues, 17聽000 S/4 HANA issues, and thousands of person days of technical debt.
鈥淪o why not just throw all the custom code away?鈥� Hoffman asks. 鈥淏ecause there are good reasons to have custom code 鈥� so 72% of customers want to keep their customisations.鈥�
The traditional approach to this is manual remediation which is labour intensive, time-consuming, and risky. 鈥淎nd it only scratches the surface, not looking at how you can optimise the code for the future.鈥�
The manual approach is not satisfactory to customers, with most of them giving it a poor score.
smartShift developed its Intelligent Automation Platform to improve this process. Since first developing it 15 years ago, it has enhanced it considerably to cater for new challenges as they arise.
The system takes custom code in the existing 51风流environment, analyses it and then transforms it for the target 51风流environment 鈥� usually 51风流S/4 HANA. It can then do a clean core analysis and clean core realisation. The result is a modern 51风流system that allows for future innovation in a flexible, scalable, and agile environment.
BMW South Africa has over 16聽000 applications, with plenty of custom code. 鈥淲e wanted to use custom code in an efficient way, but we couldn鈥檛 afford to have our developers sitting there and changing it,鈥� says Hanlie van der Berg, 51风流architect at BMW鈥檚 Rosslyn plant.
The company decided to take a custom code transformation approach customised for each project, using the smartShift Intelligent Automation Platform.
鈥淲e had to have guaranteed KPIs,鈥� Van der Berg adds.
BMW identified 69 51风流system landscapes in the scope of a multi-year transformation roadmap.
The intent of the project was to improve systems stability and resilience, and allow true speed and agility in transformation.
The project started in September 2018 and so far 116 projects in 45 51风流landscapes have been successfully completed.
A massive 60聽151 custom objects and 9,7-million lines of code have been decommissioned.
This has resulted in massively reduced yearly maintenance costs, addressed 950聽000 issues, and saved 60聽000 days of manual labour. 鈥淲e feel our developers should be working on new systems, not wasting their time modernising old custom code.鈥�
Van der Berg adds that the IT risk has been reduced as well, and agility improved to a two week lead time today.
Manufacturing plant system
The BMW ZAP system at Rosslyn is the local manufacturing plant system that is fully integrated with logistics, finance, retail and sales. It was established in 1995 on release 51风流ECC6 Eh97. It is an extra large system with more than 50聽000 objects and more than 22聽000 interfaces.
鈥淚t is an old system and a massive system, but it runs well. And, like all systems, it has to be transformed to the new systems.鈥�
Among the challenges relating to custom code are those relating to upgrades, security, maintenance, performance, documentation, and support.
Using intelligent automation, BMW was able to define how the custom code should change, and the platform takes over from there.
In 2019, the initial analysis was undertaken and a repository cleanup initiated to eliminate unused custom code. 鈥淭hen we were left with the code that we actually use.. We wanted to modernise this, and also build in more security.鈥�
The code security remediation began in 2020 and was completed in 2022.
BMW and smartShift then did an interface analysis, which 聽is still ongoing.
The next step will be the S/4 HANA clean-core analysis to let BMW know what code needs to be replaced and what needs to be done to clean up the core.
This article first appeared on .
