As a company that manufactures mechanical and electrical drive systems, Flender began receiving a growing number of requests for customisable gear units. What has long been standard practice in the consumer sector has now reached the B2B segment. Customers really want products that are available in a number of variants that can be configured based on their individual needs. However, being able to supply the right gear unit to meet every need has been a time-consuming and costly undertaking up to now. In partnership with adesso, Flender sought to automate its business processes on the basis of an integrated, cutting-edge enterprise architecture.

However, as simple as the customer’s written request for a customised product may be, it has an impact on the products and processes of manufacturing companies in many ways. If Flender changes even one component in the gear unit, the entire gear unit has to be re-tested – something that takes up a lot of its engineers’ time if done by hand. Similar challenges can be found along the entire value chain, which brings with it a constant increase in complexity.

Working in partnership with adesso, Flender has fully digitalised and automated its order acquisition and order processing process. What came out in the end is an enterprise architecture for variant management that contains a smart modular system for variant configuration, which acts as a central orchestrator used to manage all business processes. This includes all workflows from the customer’s request through to the final commissioning and service at the operator’s site.

To create the enterprise architecture, adesso employed a modular approach to combine various solutions from different system environments, ranging from SAP and Salesforce to Microsoft Azure and other tools. By doing so, adesso was able to provide everything in-house, which included creating the design for a customer portal that offers a 3D visualisation of the gear units and simple self-configuration by the customer.

Flender is able to offer intelligently configurable gear units at attractive prices. The process is easy for the customer and for Flender as well. In just a few steps, a company can configure a gear unit that meets its individual needs in the high quality that Flender is known for, while Flender itself is able to lessen the workload of its engineers thanks to smart variant management as well as reduce its lead times and production costs.