Two at once for customer Flint Group

Sept. 25, 2008 - PRLog -- Flint Group has brought its central European SAP system up to the latest state of the art, while at the same time migrating its entire data basis to Unicode. BASF IT Services was responsible for technical migration of the IT systems as the main cooperation partner.

Using the international standard Unicode, the worldwide printing and packaging industry company's SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system can now represent the character sets used with any of the world's languages.

Flint Group has worked together with BASF IT Services for several years. Since the creation of Flint Group in the consolidation of three companies in 2005, the IT service provider has completely redesigned Flint's European corporate network, integrating various IT systems and setting up uniform e-mail and Internet platforms operated in the BASF IT Services data center.

BASF IT Services joined forces with a Flint Group project team in almost nine months of preparations for the completion of the release change migrating the software to the latest version simultaneously with the implementation of Unicode. As a result, more than 1,000 SAP users of the business-critical SAP system for the areas Finance, Logistics, Materials Management and Production Control were able to use the system again after only a single weekend.

The newly introduced Unicode standard defines a unique digital code for each written character used in the system, regardless of the program, platform or language. In doing so, Unicode eliminates differing and incompatible coding in various countries and cultural areas. One example: If a company employee enters an SAP document using Chinese characters, this document can now easily be displayed with the same characters and printed out in Germany.

"We are very satisfied with the results. It was our objective to carry out the release change and the Unicode migration in a single step," says Heinz Ensen, CIO at Flint Group Europe GmbH. "The close cooperation with BASF IT Services and their expert knowledge were of great value to us. This let us avoid a second period of system downtime, saving us both time and money," Ensen continues.

"It was all made possible through meticulous preparation and countless tests in the run-up to the migration. The second important factor was the broad range of experience we've gained in similar projects in the manufacturing and process industries in past years," adds Dr. Ralf Sonnberger, Managing Director at BASF IT Services.

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BASF IT Services, a BASF Group company, is among the leading IT service providers for the process industry in Europe. More information on BASF IT Services is available at www.basf-it-services.com.