Founded as an auto and aircraft parts manufacturer in Berlin in 1908, the Brose Group[1] is a partner to the international automobile industry and delivers systems for vehicle doors, lift gates, seat structures and electric drives to some 80 automobile brands and more than 30 suppliers. Approximately 22,000 employees work for this family-owned company at 58 locations in 23 countries. In fiscal 2013, the company generated sales of approx. 4.7 billion euros. Brose ranks among the TOP 40 of automotive suppliers worldwide and is the fifth-largest family-owned company in this industrial sector. Major Brose customers include General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen, Toyota, and Honda.

From the 1990s to the present, Brose has enjoyed rapid growth, some of it coming from the acquisition of existing companies and some of it coming from the organic expansion of Broses own facilities. As it grew,Brose inherited or acquired a wide range of functional software applications, including accounting, human resources, manufacturing, and supply chain management applications. But as their business has expanded and has become both more complex and more integrated, Brose Group management found that existing information systems were unable to support the company's emerging operational, control, and planning/innovation needs. Too many different information systems meant a lack of standardization and hampered communication among suppliers, plants, and customers. Brose decided to standardize operations on R/3, an ERP application licensed by SAP that supports more than a thousand different business processes. There were distinct advantages for the corporation in making this choice:

The SAP suite of enterprise software applications aligned nicely with Brose business processes although in a number of instances Brose reengineered and standardized established business processes to make better use of SAP ERP capabilities.

The SAP package afforded better oversight and measurement of Brose business process through real-time reporting and process value-chain integration.

The software suite also allowed Brose to accumulate comprehensive and accurate data about key processes and business performance that was subsequently employed to learn about organizational weaknesses and to identify best practices, leading to process improvements and better enterprise-wide business forecasting and long-term planning.

Overtime, the investment also lowered the total cost of information management and information technology investment.

Broses conversion of its core information management systems to the SAP ERP system has contributed to dramatic improvements in enterprise-wide productivity. In 1994, Brose achieved sales of 541 million euros with 2,900 employees, or 186,000 euros per employee. Ten years later, in 2004, Brose attained sales of 2 billion euros with 8,200 employees, or 240,000 euros per employee. And in 2013, despite a world-wide economic downturn and the nearly doubling of its size, the Brose Group has maintained these impressive numbers, reaching revenues of 4.7 billion euros.

In terms of the formidable challenge in implementing SAP across Brose, the firm followed well-established IT management best practices. First, they hired SAP Consulting (a value-added reseller of SAP products and services known for its SAP implementation expertise) to lead the project. The SAP Consulting team provided process consulting and implementation support, as well as end user and Brose technical staff training. According to Christof Lutz, SAP Consultings project manager, "Our consultants and the Brose experts worked openly, flexibly, and constructively together. In this atmosphere of trust, we created an implementation module that the customer can use as a basis for the long term."

In setting up the SAP ERP, Brose adopted many of the database structures and metadata building into the application suite but also incorporated various business rulers and metrics of particular relevant to Broses core business processes. The implementation team then chose a piloted approach to installation. The first Brose facility to deploy the SAP ERP was a new plant in Curitiba, Brazil. The team constructed the implementation to be used as a prototype for installations at subsequent plant locations. Successfully achieving this first implementation was no small feat, because it involved the introduction of new information systems and related business processes for sales and distribution, materials management, production planning, quality management, and financial accounting and control.

Once the initial system was operational at the Curitiba plant, the team pursued a phased rolled out across Brose other manufacturing facilities. The second implementation, in Puebla, Mexico, required just 6 months to become fully operational, and the next implementation in Meerane, Germany, was operational in just 19 weeks.

[1] Sources: brose.de/en/pub/company (accessed November 2004); http://www.firmenverzeichnis (accessed May 6, 2014).

What are the business activities of Brose Group and what are the business critical success factors (CSFs)?

Brose Primary Business Activities	Critical Success factors
add more rows as need be

What operational, management and control, and corporate learning/innovation challenges were faced byBrose during its rapid expansion over the last two decades?

Brose Activities	Challenges of Rapid Expansion
operations
	add more rows as need be
management and control
	add more rows as need be
corporate learning and innovation
	add more rows as need be

What would be the benefits and the risks of retaining the functional application software found in eachBrose location prior to the move to SAP?

Benefits	Risks
add more rows as needed

What were the benefits and risks of the move to SAP ERP software?

Benefits	Risks
add more rows as needed

What steps did they take to minimize the risks associated with this kind of deployment?

.

.

.

.

.

add more lines as needed