KHD Wins SAP Quality Award 2012
Underlining KHD’s commitment to operational excellence, the company received recognition at SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW event on November 14, in Madrid, Spain. KHD’s recently completed SAP project, called K1 logistics, received a gold medal in the 2012 SAP Quality Awards. These prestigious awards recognize candidates who use SAP’s ten quality principles “to meet or exceed their business process requirements and, in the end, deliver significant business value”.
A panel including industry experts, leaders in academia, senior SAP partners and staff, as well as former quality award winners were responsible for selecting this year‘s winners. SAP Quality Awards were given within each of SAP’s 16 markets, with each market divided into small, medium, and large implementation categories. KHD competed in the German market, in the large project implementation category. The large implementation category includes only SAP projects that required more than 12 months and greater than 1,400 man-days to complete, with the final SAP product handling over 500 users.
Jörg Ludwig, KHD’s Global Head of IT and Business Systems, commented on the award, “we convinced the panel with our flexible approach to development, which used theoretical blueprints as well as feedback from realistic prototypes, so we are very closely aligned with the actual needs of our customers. However, the biggest driver for our success was our strong project team. This is a reflection on the entire organization.”
Another key consideration was the complexity of the project. Currently, KHD uses approximately 750 different program features during regular daily operation. More than 160 of these features were customized to fit the needs of KHD and its industry. Globally, a total of 625 users are active in the K1 system.
Michael Nielsen, Corporate Change Manager at KHD, also noted, “there are 52 K1 team members who can call themselves winners. They all made extraordinary contributions with their ideas, time, and personal commitment to help make the project a success. Thanks K1 team!”