Headquartered in Aurich, Germany, ENERCON has been a technology leader in the wind power sector for more than 35 years. The company has a service and sales network that spans more than 45 countries.

Employees:

18,000
Headquarters:

Aurich, Germany
Founded:

1984

Summary

Challenges

Financial documents must be retained for 10+ years
24/7 archive availability required for audits
Up to 5,000 invoices received daily
Aimed to reduce data center costs by migrating to cloud

Solution

Migrated 9TB of on-premises data to OpenText™ Core Archive for SAP® Solutions with zero disruption to business users

Results

Ensured 24/7 uptime for 20 million records
Achieved cost savings of at least €23,000 a year
Freed IT staff to support digital transformation

Challenge

Financial documents must be retained for 10+ years
24/7 archive availability required for audits
Up to 5,000 invoices received daily
Aimed to reduce data center costs by migrating to cloud

Combating climate change demands a fast transition to modern, renewable energy, and ENERCON GmbH aims to accelerate the move to sustainable power generation. A German-based market leader in wind turbine design and manufacturing since the mid-1990s, the company operates in Germany, Brazil, India, Canada, Turkey and Portugal.

To keep its production lines rolling smoothly, ENERCON depends on an efficient back office. In the company’s finance function, accounting specialists use SAP® S/4HANA applications to help process key documents such as purchase orders, supplier invoices and delivery notifications.

As Timo Feldner, project manager at ENERCON IT Service GmbH, explains, “Every day, we receive between 2,000 and 5,000 invoices, around 400 of which are in paper format. Our regulator in Germany requires us to retain copies of financial documents for 10 years, so for compliance purposes, we create digital copies of all our invoices.”

For almost two decades, ENERCON relied on an on-premises deployment of OpenText™ Archiving and Document Access for SAP® Solutions to help it deliver reliable, long-term retention of financial documents.

“Our financial document archiving workflows are similar for electronic and paper records. We use optical character recognition [OCR] to capture data from PDF as well as scanned paper documents, which then flows into SAP. Next, we leverage the OpenText solution to back up the data to an immutable storage platform,” explains Malte Coordes, IT engineer at ENERCON IT Service GmbH.

To drive operational efficiency, the company looked for a way to move its archiving services to the cloud without disruption.

“ENERCON has embarked on a cloud transformation initiative, and we saw that moving away from on-premises archiving would deliver many advantages for the organization,” comments Feldner.

“In particular, the cloud would reduce the cost and complexity of delivering high availability for document archiving, since we would no longer be responsible for infrastructure management and maintenance. The cloud also promised fast and fine-grained scalability. For example, allowing us to rapidly support new business users without the lead time of provisioning, deploying and configuring new systems in our data center.”

colleagues working on tablets with wind turbine in background

We have trusted OpenText Core Archive for SAP Solutions to support ENERCON’s mission-critical document archiving needs for more than 15 years, and we look forward to building on those successes in the OpenText Cloud.

Malte Coordes
IT Engineer, ENERCON IT Service GmbH

Solution

To deliver continuity for vital document archiving services while eliminating its dependence on costly on-premises infrastructure, ENERCON moved to OpenText Core Archive for SAP Solutions in the OpenText Cloud—an all-in-one archiving service for SAP data and documents. By partnering with experts from OpenText, ENERCON achieved a seamless transition to the new platform that was completely transparent to business users.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Core Archive for SAP® Solutions

Manage and use information cost-effectively and securely with a unified cloud-based archiving service.

Moving seamlessly to the cloud

Working side-by-side with OpenText, ENERCON migrated 20 million documents from its on-premises archive to the cloud. After running the on-premises and cloud systems in parallel for several weeks, ENERCON switched seamlessly to the cloud solution, enabling it to securely archive 9TB of data and decommission its on-premises infrastructure.

“We are very pleased with the collaboration between ENERCON and OpenText,” says Coordes. “We learned and grew together over the course of the project, and by the end it was as if we were all a single team. Although the business does not notice any changes, behind the scenes we’ve dramatically improved the efficiency, scalability and flexibility of our document archiving services.”

By moving to the cloud, we have scaled our document archive storage from 9TB to 15TB while reducing our operational costs.

Timo Feldner
Project Manager, ENERCON IT Service GmbH

Results

By archiving documents in the OpenText Cloud, ENERCON ensures that its financial data is protected around the clock and available for auditors on demand. The company is also reaping the rewards of decommissioning its on-premises IT infrastructure, which is projected to deliver annual cost-savings.

Achieved 24/7 uptime for 20 million archived documents

Today, ENERCON uses OpenText Core Archive for SAP Solutions to process up to 5,000 invoices a day during peak periods. With a service-level agreement for >99% availability, the company can be sure that archiving services are running 24/7, mitigating regulatory risk while boosting operational cost-efficiency.

“If ENERCON were unable to provide evidence of financial transactions during an audit or validate data in the general ledger, the company would be exposed to significant regulatory and reputational risks,” says Coordes. “For this reason, we used to devote significant human resources to managing and maintaining our on-premises archiving infrastructure. Today, we can reassign those teams to value-added activities, such as supporting the business through its ongoing cloud transformation.”

Saved more than €23,000 a year on rising data center energy costs

By moving from data centers to the cloud, ENERCON has significantly reduced its exposure to the fast-rising cost of energy in Europe.

Feldner comments: “By moving to the cloud, we have scaled our document archive storage from 9TB to 15TB while reducing our operational costs. When we initially calculated our total cost of ownership, we determined that OpenText Core Archive for SAP Solutions would deliver savings of €23,000 a year and deliver payback within two years. Since then, wholesale energy prices in Germany have increased by 25% on average, which means the cloud solution will likely be even more cost-effective for ENERCON in the long term.”