Brose raises its supply chain performance with cloud transformation

Founded in 1908, Brose is a global automotive supplier. The family-owned business builds mechatronic components and systems for vehicle doors, seats, electric drives, and electronics at 69 locations in 25 countries worldwide. To do so, the company has established a network of more than 14,000 suppliers around the world. Today, every second car built in the world contains at least one Brose product.

Working with a global supplier base of such a scale had led to certain limiting constraints. While each supplier in the company’s existing legacy system was required to maintain multiple usernames and passwords to conduct business with Brose, they also had to be set up with access to specific, relevant backend applications depending on the role associated with each username. Finally, every organization within this network, including Brose, faced time-consuming, complicated, and resource-intensive processes daily.

To address these constraints, Brose wanted to launch a transformation project that would deliver a solution to fundamentally change the management of its supply chain by enabling more effective and simplified coordination with its worldwide suppliers.

“For me, innovation always starts with a business challenge that needs to be solved. To see what we have achieved now, developing a solution tailored to our needs using state-of-the-art technology, is both exciting and a great example of what is possible through collaboration.”

Christian Ley
CIO, Brose

Self-service offers the key to supply chain simplification

In an effort to ensure the success of this initiative, Brose enlisted Capgemini and SAP to establish a three-way co-innovation initiative. The project team went on to create a proof-of-concept of the supplier integration app built on SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP). Brose and Capgemini then worked together in a co-innovation approach by following rapid and agile development based on scrum methodologies. Using the right blend of BTP services helped the team keep both the development time and custom software development to a minimum. This led to the first proof-of-concept of what became the Capgemini Supplier Integration for Automotive (CSI4Auto), a SaaS solution to assist in intelligent identity management by acting as a single digital gateway and central collaboration platform.

With the solution in place, the supplier portal now only requires a single sign on to access back-end applications. By leveraging the SAP identity authentication service, the solution allows central access to any cloud or on-premise application out of the box. In addition, supplier administrators can manage new user onboarding while self-registration allows supplier employees to sign on for different legal entities, after which they only see content relevant to their roles within that legal entity and can access related backend resources.

Meanwhile, a predefined role concept enables an intelligent identify management approach, wherein applications are assigned to different roles, and allows Brose to roll out new applications to the right supplier employees. Once a new application is assigned to a role, access Is provided to every supplier employee in that role. Finally, SAP services make workflow modeling easier with Embedded Workflow-Concept and SAP BTP workflow triggers the automatic identity deprovisioning to the Brose backend systems.

“This is the first, but one of the most important steps on our way. In the future, all digital tasks along the supply chain will be carried out on this platform. The supplier will have a single “digital gateway” to all Brose processes.”

Michael Seifert
Project Manager, Supplier Portal, Brose

Co-innovation provides a foundation for success

Following the successful implementation of CSI4Auto at Brose, the automotive parts manufacturer has gained greater control over its supply chain by making supplier coordination simpler and more efficient.

By enabling suppliers to manage their own accounts with a self-registration portal, the company has reduced the amount of administrative effort required. Single sign on provides the access users need through streamlined and reliable security processes. The predefined role concept provides further agency by allowing suppliers to assign employees to different roles, after which they can access all role-specific content and tools through a single portal. Finally, the solution delivers simplified user management and first level support by removing barriers to communication and effective collaboration.

To date, the co-innovation between Brose, Capgemini, and SAP has delivered an 80% reduction in manual effort when using the new supplier integration application, 50% faster supplier user onboarding, and a 20% decrease in support volume. Through the combination of expertise and vision brought by the three organizations, the partners created a simplified supplier network that more effectively supports Brose as well as suppliers and their employees around the world.

“Co-innovation is born when a client like Brose presents an industry-specific problem that many companies have which is not yet supported by any product on the market. That’s when Capgemini and SAP work with the client to solve that problem in an innovative way and develop a product as a SaaS offering in the SAP Business Technology Platform.”

Markus Winkler
Executive Vice President, Global Automotive Industry, Capgemini