Wien Energie is an energy supply company in Austria based in Vienna. The company is one of the largest electricity and gas suppliers with around 2 million customers in Vienna and the surrounding area. Wien Energie has set itself the goal of promoting energy efficiency in the region and is focusing on renewable energies such as wind power, photovoltaics, and biomass.
In addition to energy supply, Wien Energie is also involved in various projects and initiatives to promote sustainability and environmental protection. For example, the company participates in the “Clean City” campaign, which organizes waste collection campaigns in Vienna, and promotes electromobility by expanding charging stations for electric cars.
Wien Energie was confronted with the challenge that, after various data migrations, the uniform quality of the master data for warehouse materials did not always meet all existing and future requirements. Software that had already been purchased for the automatic generation of material descriptions could not be used to its full extent because the data was not yet sufficiently structured and complete.
Due to the addressed data quality issues, it was difficult to search for the required spare parts, tools, etc. in the systems, and changing products or contractual partners involved a great deal of effort. Given its limited internal resources, the company wanted to find a solution to comprehensively clean up its material master data and automate data-driven processes.
To select a suitable partner, Wien Energie launched a public tender for its data cleansing project. After a demanding selection process involving several competitors and a number of workshops, D&TS ultimately won the contract thanks to the content of its proposal, its references, and its price-performance ratio. D&TS's experience in the energy sector, which it was able to contribute to the project, proved particularly valuable.
In the summer of 2020, the Material Master Data Cleansing (MMDC) project was launched at Wien Energie with an MDM Excellence Workshop and an actual/target analysis. Existing data was analyzed in terms of structure and quality in order to identify areas requiring action and to draw up a project plan. In addition, the decision was made to introduce the ECLASS classification standard.
The project was divided into several steps. First, many inactive or no longer used materials were identified and deleted in order to prepare only project-relevant material masters.
Then, an initial duplicate analysis was performed, during which many duplicates were found through basic textual recognition. In order to be able to assign the data to the D&TS databases later, the essential commercial characteristics of each material were recorded separately.
In addition, new standard designations were defined for each material in order to automatically generate general texts such as material short texts, purchase order texts, and long texts. These standard designations could also be used to create class proposals, which simplified further processes. In total, more than 46,000 materials were classified according to ECLASS 10.1 and practical feature lists were defined for all classes (ECLASS standard and company-specific features). To supplement missing product information, a comparison was made with the ClassCOCKPIT Knowledge Database (standard and manufacturer catalogs according to ECLASS).
Incorrect or missing product information posed a challenge, so the ClassCOCKPIT Supplier Portal was used for a supplier campaign in January 2021. D&TS took care of onboarding the defined contractual partners and the initial quality check, while Wien Energie was responsible for the second quality check and approval.
Although the data was optimized by mapping it to the knowledge database and using the data exchange platform, a “material delta” remained that did not meet the specified quality requirements. This data was subsequently enriched by a “Google action,” i.e., additional Internet research.
The combination of D&TS databases, Supplier Action, and Google ultimately led to a massive improvement in data quality.
After a second duplicate analysis, the classified data was made available in ClassCOCKPIT SAP format and imported into the SAP quality assurance system (“Q-System”). This data was then checked and approved by Wien Energie. The classified master data was then imported into the SAP production system using the ClassCOCKPIT SAP software solution.
In the “PROnaming” project step, rules were defined for the material short text generator. This ensures that the material short text is always generated according to the same structure, even for new materials, and is therefore displayed uniformly.
As part of its digitalization strategy, Wien Energie successfully implemented the material application and classification process in collaboration with D&TS. Among other things, this involves integrating the ClassCOCKPIT-Ticket and ClassCOCKPIT-AP solutions from D&TS into the existing Winshuttle Foundation workflows.
With ClassCOCKPIT Ticket, Wien Energie improves the management of material master data requests and ensures data quality. The system delivers clean, classified, and process-compliant product master data that meets the company's individual requirements.
The result
Thanks to the successful “Material Master Data Cleansing” project, Wien Energie was able to raise its material master data to a high level of quality. By using several harmonization, enrichment, and cleansing procedures from D&TS, not only was incorrect data corrected and incomplete data enriched, but uniform names were also created and duplicates removed.
The high data quality now forms the basis for follow-up processes such as automatic material short text generation. Thanks to the D&TS ticket system, Wien Energie will be able to maintain this high data quality in the future, even after the successful initial data cleansing project.
D&TS takes care of classification and, if necessary, supplements missing product information by contacting contract partners and manufacturers directly to ensure that all materials, including spare parts and consumables, are classified correctly (D&TS Full Service). This means that Wien Energie can be sure that its data for material stocking is always up to date, thus ensuring optimal data-driven processes. Internal resources can now be used elsewhere in the value chain.
The outlook
Wien Energie has successfully completed the introduction of the ECLASS classification standard to create added value for purchasing and maintenance. The next step could be to establish a product group structure based on the classification to support bundling and to group and compare similar materials. This will make it even easier to find suitable suppliers and reduce costs. In addition, Wien Energie is planning a further step toward digital transformation by replacing the Winshuttle Foundation automation platform with the latest generation, Automate Evolve from Precisely.
