Largest Manufacturer of Home Appliances BSH Transforms Finance and Adopts Cloud with SAP

The largest manufacturer of home appliances BSH Hausgeräte GmbH transforms finance and adopts cloud with SAP for data management.

BSH Hausgeräte GmbH is the largest manufacturer of home appliances in Europe and one of the leading companies worldwide, with brands like Bosch, Siemens, and Gaggenau in its portfolio, for decades. Partnering with SAP, BSH is transforming its IT landscape to a cloud-first foundation, aiming to free employees from manual tasks and put insights at the center of decision-making.

BSH manufactures home appliances in 39 factories worldwide, represented in 50 countries. BSH currently works to bring accounting and controlling together into one integrated process, supported by real-time data and analytics. The principle that guides this transformation is to test new technologies to support its vision. SAP Datasphere, SAP's next-generation data management platform that can seamlessly integrate with third-party data and unify and govern all SAP data, is presently being conducted by BSH.

In a recent case, accounting balances were automatically connected, P&L data and market metrics were controlled in SAP Datasphere, and consolidated reports were delivered without the need for spreadsheets or human labor.

Heiko Schletz, Head of Governance, Methods, and Systems at BSH Hausgeräte GmbH, believes that using a cloud-based, synchronized toolset would allow his financial team to give the most up-to-date numbers for decision-making faster and with less manual consolidation. He also believes that the machine can perform best in what it does while people can focus on creating value.

BSH's long-term financial objective is to eliminate silos in accounting, control, and treasury. Schletz proposes a parallel archive architecture that supports both legal entities and aggregated group views, allowing for sophisticated analytics like value-driver trees. By transitioning to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, which is connected with SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, BSH hopes to create a single source of truth for finance, ranging from subsidiary ledgers to group-level aggregation.

To make the most of analytics and AI capabilities, BSH is now unifying and restructuring its whole business application stack. The company's goal is to transition from six independent ERP solutions to a single global SAP S/4HANA environment that includes all companies and territories.