Preparing for the Future with crossgate’s Help

ARGO-HYTOS uses new B2B 360° services for SAP™ solutions

Starnberg on 3 December 2007

German hydraulics company ARGO-HYTOS GmbH is now converting to paperless business processes and is entrusting experienced B2B specialist crossgate with the implementation. ARGO-HYTOS is also set to profit from the new partnership between crossgate and SAP™ regarding the introduction of its SAP™ business software at eleven of its international locations. crossgate’s B2B 360° services for SAP™ solutions enable data to be exchanged electronically whenever EDI is necessary and also give customers access to a pool of more than 34,000 business partners directly from their SAP™ system.

The world’s leading manufacturer of components for industrial and mobile hydraulic systems, ARGO-HYTOS has a global workforce of more than 1,000 employees working in a total of eleven subsidiaries. In order to optimise its business processes and reduce its administrative costs, the firm decided to take advantage of the benefits of exchanging data electronically and convert to EDI. “An in-house implementation would have been too costly and lacked transparency,” explains Kai Sievers, CIO at ARGO-HYTOS.

“That’s the reason we chose to use crossgate’s on-demand EDI service. The B2B specialist isn’t just a competent and experienced partner, but it’s also got an attractive package for EDI, which we feel is an aspect of business with a lot of promise,” the manager adds enthusiastically.

Another factor is that ARGO-HYTOS is introducing SAP™ at all of its company locations.

The decision-makers in its IT department recognised the advantage of employing an EDI company with close connections to the software producer from Walldorf. crossgate’s ondemand service connects to SAP NetWeaver XI™ automatically, immediately enabling its users to exchange data with their business partners electronically. The B2B/EDI service works without any additional components having to be employed, which means no further costs are incurred for extra hardware or software. All that customers have to pay for is the amount of data transactions that have actually taken place. Apart from this benefit, a number of ARGO-HYTOS’ customers such as Kraus-Maffei and ZF have already been connected up to crossgate’s transaction platform, B.I.P., so ARGO-HYTOS can also profit from the synergy effects of the B2B network at the same time. All in all, fifteen customers are going to be integrated initially on a step-by-step basis. “Everyone on our team was impressed by what the new system could do,” recalls Sievers, “but what surprised us most of all was the speed with which the extremely positive effects of EDI became apparent.” ARGO-HYTOS has decided to digitise its business processes at all of its corporate sites in future and then transmit all of its invoices, delivery notes and other such documents digitally.

crossgate AG:

The crossgate AG is specialized in B2B-Integration and Cross Automation – the intermedia automation of business processes in and between companies. The core is the biggest B2B transaction platform (B.I.P.):

More than 34,000 companies change data and documents via the B.I.P. already – independently of format and through all limits. The new B2B 360° Services “powered by SAP®“ enable all customers to immediately access all Business Partners integrated in the platform directly out of their SAP® System.

The transaction-based Business model has been established in the automotive-, logistic-, trade, chemistry- and industrial-division. crossgate was founded in 2001 in Starnberg nearby Munich. The principal shareholders of crossgate are the family of SAP founder Dietmar Hopp, the Otto Wolff Industrieberatung und Beteiligungen GmbH and the Al-Jomaih Group. Beside its head office in Starnberg, crossgate is represented in five other locations all over Germany, e.g. in Berlin, Cologne and Walldorf.

Furthermore, the company operates overseas branches in Atlanta, London, Milan and Paris. The Cross Automation expert has currently more than 200 employees. The founder and CEO of crossgate is Stefan Tittel.

More information at www.crossgate.de