Automotive manufacturer BMW has officially opened a systems, applica- tions and products (SAP) competence hub in Pretoria.

Together with two other information technology (IT) hubs, situated in the US and India, the BMW SAP competence hub will render IT services worldwide, concentrating specifically on SAP-based production applications.

“Currently, process requirements and process solutions extend beyond all departmental boundaries. Therefore, we require end-to-end considerations of the technical processes and customer interfaces. As a result of this further development, BMW Group IT has taken another decisive step towards customer orientation, standardisation, agility and internationalisation by opening an SAP competence hub in South Africa,” says BMW Group CIO Karl Probst.

BMW South Africa MD Bodo Donauer highlights that the company has been exporting the BMW 3 Series sedan to other parts of the world from South Africa since 1992. However, it is a little-known fact that cars have not been South Africa’s only BMW export. For the past six years, BMW South Africa has been outsourcing its local IT expertise to other BMW production locations worldwide.

“Concentrating specifically on configuring and enhancing SAP to cater to the specific requirements of the BMW Group production network, the work of these IT software engineers has allowed for complex, just-in-time and just-in-sequence production processes to operate seamlessly in markets such as China, Brazil and India. Additional SAP services, ranging from sales and marketing, logistics and human resources to finance solutions, have been supplied to Germany, the US and the UK,” he notes.

Probst notes that the pooling of specific application-based software at the IT competence centres, which share the global responsibility for promoting industrialisation of BMW IT. Also, this is a further development of the IT group from being a federal IT structure – incorporating a central IT function and process-orientated specialised IT centres – to a strengthened, centralised IT organisation spanning all departments and multiple global locations.

Unlike other markets in the world, South African SAP skills are unique in terms of how multiskilled the resources are, says Donauer, noting that about 60% of all South African SAP configurators are also SAP software developers. This is attributed to the South African market mainly comprising medium-sized companies, which forces consultants to be multiskilled to enhance their competitiveness. This local skills base provides BMW Group with access to a unique resource pool.

“The local competence hub, with a staff complement of about 80 SAP software engineers, will concentrate its efforts on delivering world-class IT solutions to the BMW global production network, specifically in the areas of BMW internal business processes, which entail production logistics, warehousing and production IT solutions. Each of these applications makes it possible to produce highly complex and innovative vehicles just in time and just in sequence at multiple production locations worldwide,” Donauer points out.