It’s often the medium-scale companies who write the best digitalization stories: Hidden champions like Gruner AG, a family-run innovation driver that employs over 400 staff. Deeply rooted in the Swabian town of Wehingen, Gruner is a global market leader for polarized bistable relays, and the company plays a major role as an internationally valued development and solutions partner for electromagnets and actuators. Gruner’s stringent innovation and quality standards are grounded in manufacturing depth, in-house prototyping and engineering for tooling and testing equipment. To ensure that its technology solutions remain viable in the long term, Gruner has developed a digitalization strategy aimed at end-to-end digitalization of the entire manufacturing process, from the tendering process through to series production. As implementation partner, Gruner chose a global player: IT, software and consulting provider CENIT.
The collaboration, initiated in 2023, will focus on consistent implementation of an “SAP First” strategy, by which all technological and value-adding information will be integrated into a hybrid SAP infrastructure, continually and consistently updated and made available throughout all stages of the process flow. In future, this data backbone will form the core of the entire digitalized value chain at Gruner, across all its distributed locations.
“Based on the hybrid approach we have chosen, we want to map all our core processes in SAP – from the tendering procedure to engineering, purchasing, series manufacturing and through to logistics – and thus achieve maximum efficiency”, says Martin Spreitzer, CEO of Gruner AG, in outlining the project’s objectives.
Gruner already expects to see initial, measurable results by mid-2023.
