Siemens Gamesa integrates SAP and ServiceNow

Mission

The takeover of almost 60 percent of the shares in Gamesa by Siemens Windpower created Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, or Siemens Gamesa for short, a giant in the wind sector with annual sales of over ten billion euros: Siemens Gamesa has been the clear number one in the offshore sector for years and is among the top five in the onshore sector.

IT plays a key role in the expansion of the excellent business position in order to optimally utilize the strengths of the two former individual players Gamesa and Siemens Windpower together.

Accordingly, the central question for Siemens Gamesa's integration management was: How can the two existing IT landscapes of Siemens Windpower and Gamesa be transformed into a future-oriented "One IT"? The aim was to provide even better support for the new, joint business - on the one hand for further growth, and on the other for the further professionalization of processes in structures that have grown very rapidly in some cases.

IT management opted for a greenfield approach in order to flexibly support the complementary business units. This included both the former Siemens Windpower with its traditional (offshore) focus in Europe and the USA and the former Gamesa with its onshore strength and a strong footprint in Latin America.

Siemens Gamesa decided to break new ground in the connectivity of the two strategic platforms SAP and ServiceNow. At the time of the integration in 2017, new platform providers were increasingly pushing into the traditional domain of the large legacy middleware vendors. No-code platforms and iPaaS, i.e. platform as a service, were the buzzwords of the moment; today they are megatrends.

In addition to focusing on future viability, the motto for a listed company with the corresponding regulatory requirements is: "Do it right first time". This applies in particular to the connection of two mission-critical eco-systems such as SAP and ServiceNow. There is no room for the use of immature technology.

Benefits & solution

"We have known the Galileo Group as one of the leading SAP ALM providers for 15 years and were aware of the high engineering quality and corporate maturity of the Galileo Group's solutions. That's why we chose Conigma™ Connect as our no-code iPaaS integration platform," says Christian Lange, Head of Application Management at Siemens Gamesa, explaining the decision to choose Conigma™ Connect.

The Galileo Group realized the proof of concept (PoC) in less than ten days. The subsequent implementation, including the global go-live, also only required ten days of external consulting for the final customizing of Conigma™ Connect.

 Christian Lange says: "Our expectations in terms of time-to-market, attractive pricing, flexibility thanks to the no-code approach, operational stability and service quality were fully met by the Galileo Group."

Procedure

In the first step, the main ServiceNow change management processes were linked with operational SAP Solution Manager ChaRM as transport management:

Siemens Gamesa uses ServiceNow for incident, feature and change management and SAP Solution Manager ChaRM with a focus on SAP TMS transport management.

In technical terms, so-called ServiceNow change tasks are linked to SAP Solution Manager ChaRM change documents via Conigma™ Connect. The hierarchically superordinate SAP Solution Manager ChaRM change requests are not used here, but are conceptually replaced by ServiceNow Changes.

The technical integration

Technical integrationtakes place via the ServiceNow standard APIs and via the SAP Solution Manager ChaRM API (= ABAP add-on from Galileo Group) supplied out-of-the-box by Conigma™ Connect, as shown in the following illustration.

During integration, it was important to Siemens Gamesa that the no-code approach was used to link data and processes with the associated workflows using drag & drop. This meant that new changes and requests, which only became virulent during the course of the project, could be incorporated at the touch of a button.

In addition, an automatic end-to-end audit trail is generated via Conigma™ Connect:

This means that an audit-proof status of the state of the respective specialist requirement / change is always provided and documented across the entire tool hierarchy / tool chain.

This bidirectional, fully automated link is of crucial importance, as Siemens Gamesa strategically decided to outsource the application services to an international IT service company as part of the integration of the two companies.

According to IT strategist Christian Lange, integrating ServiceNow and SAP ChaRM via customer-specific coding or an "individual consulting solution" from the outsourcing partner would have taken far too long and would also have been very maintenance-intensive and therefore costly.

Siemens Gamesa also benefits from the Conigma™ Connect iPaaS approach in terms of maintenance: if interfaces in the SAP or ServiceNow ecosystems change, the Galileo Group immediately updates them in its iPaaS platform, which is already covered by the subscription fee.

Outlook

Based on the positive experience with the integration of the first main processes (ServiceNow Change Management with SAP Transport Management), the next step will be the integration of SAP Solution Manager Monitoring and ServiceNow Incident Management (see illustration).

This further contributes to quality by design and efficiency: Traditionally, alerts in the SAP Solution Manager's monitoring module are sent as emails in the event of malfunctions in the SAP system - with a potentially uncertain outcome as to whether, when and by whom this email will be processed.

By integrating Conigma™ Connect, an incident is now to be generated in ServiceNow. Multiple alerts on the same topic are then automatically filtered out. The status of processing at the IT outsourcer is automatically tracked and fed back, ensuring maximum transparency: a further step towards greater transparency and automation along the IT value chain, while at the same time reducing costs.