Optimised customer fulfilment with automated processes

Bernstein AG, established in 1947 and headquartered in Porta Westfalica, Germany, builds and sells components and systems for industrial automation peripherals used in elevators and escalators, doors, and gates. Dependable innovations from the company's main portfolio of switches, sensors, and enclosures guarantee safety for operators, machines, and processes. The company provides a widespread spectrum of Safe Solutions to customers in the whole of Europe and overseas. Today, Bernstein employs 500 people in seven bases worldwide and has managed the jump into the 21st century.

Many companies try to distinguish themselves from their competition through quality and price. However, in order to remain competitive in the future, it needs more than providing high-quality products at a cheap rate. In the new millennium, time has taken a leading role among the critical success factors. Particularly in developed nations, time has become a much scarcer good than money. Following this trend, customers are willing to pay more for a product if the shipping time is minimal or non-existent. The shorter the shipping time, the higher the probability of closing a deal. Bernstein saw itself confronted with the task of preparing the company for the future. In 1999, the individual enterprises were combined within Bernstein AG. The reorganization of the enterprise group was completed in 2001 when all administration departments were pooled in Porta Westfalica. Along with these changes, the business processes had to be adjusted to fit the newly structured company and also improving them continuously became an important task. These activities aimed at securing not only quality leadership but also realizing cost advantages. Within a real-time enterprise, order placement and shipment occur nearly simultaneously. Many processes, though, comprise unnecessary time lags. Reducing delays in critical business processes ever further on the basis of current information in order to conduct them ideally with zero latency is essential to the health of any company.

Bernstein soon discovered additional room for improvement. Further automation of processes would result in reduced time lags and would reveal optimization potential. Through this, not only time and money could be saved, but also the strategic competitive position could be improved, delivering excellent customer service at minimum time. These ideas induced Bernstein's board of directors beginning in 2002 to assign the task of selecting and implementing a flexible, web-based business process management system to the information management department of the company. One of the most important technical requirements was the universal integration of the BPM Suite into the existing IT infrastructure of the company. The landscape consists of IBM iSeries (AS/400) with a PPS system, a Windows environment with Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Citrix XP server farm, and an extensive 34 MBit radio link system with VPN. Also, the interaction of the new solution with the software currently in place like the IBM DB2400 database and sales and archive solutions, for example, was a major point of interest. Especially the wide variety of customer, article, and manufacturing master data from the PPS system on the iSeries had to be automatically integrated into the process - directly and redundancy-free. After an extensive evaluation of various solutions and having taken all requirements into consideration, the decision was made in favor of the Ultimus BPM Suite. Due to its unique patented technology, making it possible to implement complex processes without the need for programming, the solution was predestined for the innovative way of automating business processes Bernstein had chosen. Being a long-time specialist for business process solutions with extensive experience through numerous implementations in companies of different sizes, from mid-size companies to large-scale enterprises, it was clear that the requirements concerning scalability and complexity could be realized. Additionally, the numerous integration possibilities of the Ultimus BPM Suite allow seamless integration into an existing, heterogeneous IT landscape.

• The project was deployed even better and faster than expected, and the usual dependencies and costs for external service providers could be extremely reduced.
• The employee's understanding of the dependencies within the company's entire process chain was improved through their participation in the take-up and optimization of their own processes.
• The BPM system was accepted as a real aid by employees, who now participate actively in optimizing processes on a daily basis.
• Quality has improved through the introduction of the BPM system, as higher transparency resulted in an improvement in accurate work.
• Standardization of business processes with the award-winning business process management technology from Ultimus generates many beneficial facets, including reduced cycle time and improved customer and sales processes.

• Responses to customer product requests on technical product variation, which previously could take up to weeks, now are reviewed, calculated, and answered within a few days.
• Return on Investment could be reached within only six months.