Electromechanics
Case Study

Marposs chooses the innovative SAP ERP to support the international growth of its business

The company

From its headquarters in the heart of the Emilia region to its production plants all over the world.

That is Marposs, a leading supplier of precision measuring equipment for increasing productivity and quality control in the workshop. With 3500 employees in Italy and abroad, Marposs offers a global response to the needs of clients in the automotive, aerospace, energy, consumer electronics and glass container sectors, providing high-tech measurement, inspection and testing solutions as well as a wide variety of sensors and controls for machine tools. Thanks to the steady growth of its business, Marposs has become a leader in quality and process control with its combination of technologically advanced products, knowledge of the market and long-term global partnerships.

The requirement

In order to support the company's growth and simplify and harmonise the work of the IT departments of all its subsidiaries and affiliated companies worldwide, Marposs needed a single, centralised tool to consistently track and analyse the corporate information provided by all its branches and production facilities worldwide. The company chose VAR BMS, a Var Group company specialising in SAP solutions, to implement the SAP S/4HANA ERP software at its Bentivoglio (BO) headquarters, covering all Marposs’ most strategic processes, including finance, production and distribution: the new digital models created for the various operating units provide real-time snapshots of the business as inputs to decision-making, as well as sharing reliable and up-to-date data with management.

The solution

Thanks to the range of integrated business models on offer (make to stock, make to order, engineering to order, services), SAP S/4HANA is the ideal tool to bring the company’s internal processes closer to the ever-changing requirements of its clients, and respond quickly and competitively to the market. Marposs was able to evaluate SAP's numerous, solid references, so as to convince itself of the completeness of the proposed solution and the resulting standardisation of its processes and applications.

The VAR BMS approach, employing SAP S/4HANA Best Practices in progressive waves and step releases, enabled Marposs to implement a pilot project in a recently acquired small manufacturing company in Italy and take it to the go-live within 6 months. The ERP solution was then extended to the entire back office of the parent company Marposs Spa and its Italian distributor, Marposs Italia, covering the areas of finance, purchasing, sales, production and MRP.

Var Group has made its redundant SAP services available 7×24 on the cloud, a solution that enables the same model to be replicated in all group companies, in a completely new scenario. This approach also made it possible to test the scalability of the solution against the structural characteristics of the Group with its many companies of different sizes.

The advantages

Thanks to the collaboration and expertise of a dedicated team of several dozen consultants, the project has built on the results achieved and trust established over time, and now manages over 750 live users. Too fully satisfy the specifications of the project, VAR BMS deployed all its application and Cloud expertise, combining the solidity of a multinational with the flexibility of a company focused on the client. Marposs, with competent and flexible technology partners like Var Group and SAP, is now able to work in a dynamic model-based mode that makes the exchange of information between the various locations fluid and transparent, and ensures scalable and optimised business management.

Future developments

Marposs plans to roll out the solution to all its Italian and foreign production and sales facilities.

“The strong growth of the Marposs Group over the last few years, partly as a result of its acquisitions, has created the need for us to standardise and integrate our processes and tools at the corporate level. Our choice of SAP and Var Group as our partner in implementing a model for our headquarters which was also scalable to the Group’s other companies proved to be a winner. We are now ready roll the solution out to our international organisation.”

Nicola Scandola - HR, Organisation and Information Systems Manager