Implementation of AMI at BOSCH

Company profile

With sales totaling more than €41 billion and 250,000 employees, the Bosch Group is not merely the world's biggest automotive supplier. It is now supported by two more pillars, those being its "industrial technology" and "consumer goods and building technology" corporate divisions. The parent company group based in Stuttgart operates more than 500 subsidiaries worldwide; within these subsidiaries, the legal structure differs distinctly from the management structure.

Moving towards the project

In addition to its uninterrupted growth, the reasons for the project included the substantially increased notification, reporting and documentation obligations relating to corporate governance, antitrust tests, IFRS-reporting (segmentation, associated persons) and tax-related disclosure and documentation obligations. 

The existing databases and information sources distributed over different locations were no longer able to fulfill these requirements.  Furthermore, the desire for a SAP®-connection became increasingly pronounced.

Decision & start of the project

In June 2005, the almost one year-long evaluation phase of the 4 involved departments C/AO (management accounting and organization), C/FI (finance and balances), C/LS (law) & C/TX (taxes), and CI (central area for information processing) was brought to a close with the purchase of the AMI standard software. 

Rainer Wilczek, the project director, says, "We had intensive discussions with the providers on the market and invested a lot of work into a comprehensive evaluation. AMI was the product that best covered our catalog of requirements.  Together with a total willingness to respond to our needs and the strong customer base as a guarantee for the supply and continued development of the product, this proved the determining factor for deciding on AMI."

Professional implementation of the software

In the ensuing time, training and modeling workshops were held, the technical system requirements were created, and the aged data was migrated.  Rainer Wilczek: "OpenData did an excellent job in the few weeks before the implementation. The data transfer initiated originally as a test migration was so successful and quickly available that we used it for the productive start.  Within a few weeks, which was much earlier than we had expected, we were able to continue operating our investment data productively in AMI."

The entire productive implementation and the roll-out in the customer departments were completely carried out by the end of 2005. At that time, an additional module developed for the administration of bonds was available and the productive connection to SAP® OM1 was established, which was implemented, upon the request of BOSCH, on the basis of a central web-services interface (SOAP).