Success-Story from: Oct 2007

Shaping the Future with Plastics™ is the vision of Borealis, the innovative provider of value creating plastic solutions.

(Success story as PDF)                              

The organization
Borealis is a worldwide leading company which has more than 40 years of experience in producing polyolefins. In 2006 there has been more than 64 new product launches and with more than 4,500 employees in 11 countries and sales revenue of 5 billion Euros. The head office is located in Vienna (Austria). Borealis is owned with 65% by IPIC of Abu Dhabi and with 35% by the Austrian OMV holding. Borealis mission for the future is to be “The” leading provider of innovative and value creating plastics solutions.

The requirements
Borealis was using a document management system since several years but at the beginning of 2005 a roadmap was introduced in replacing the existing PDMS (Plant Document Management System) with a new solution. There were several reasons like changes in business requirements and to be in line with the latest Autocad releases. Important requirements for Borealis were: working cross location as the PDMS was implemented in several Borealis locations throughout Europe. The system should cover the intensive working with external contractors as a lot of engineering work at Borealis is done outside. Last but not least a very important requirement was that the used PDMS system should have an integration into the already implemented SAP system at Borealis. The decision has been taken to move to a fully integrated SAP solution. The existing SAP system should be extended with SAP components and several CIDEON tools which where required by Borealis.

The solution
By selecting SAP DMS / CIDEON solutions the Borealis business requirements were fulfilled. By implementing the solution, the overall complexity could be reduced which means consolidating the PDMS into one system and eliminating the amount of different software components. The out of the box integration with SAP objects (Equipments, Functional Locations, etc.) will simplifies the process of searching documents for maintenance and production. The direct SAP PLM integration to AutoCAD will enables the update to the latest releases.

For Borealis external engineering contractors it would now be possible to access the system – SAP DMS - remotely and working efficiently and independently via the CIDEON Collaboration tool: the CIDEON Import and Export tool for collaborative working. SAP DMS and its components would be accessible via the normal SAP interface across all Borealis engineering sites. The decision was taken pro a direct integration with SAP and the CIDEON tools even Borealis was still on SAP release 4.6 B and the upgrade to 4.6 C had to be released in parallel to the pilot implementation.

Beside the CIDEON Collaboration tool there were also requirements for the creation of neutral formats e.g. PDF or exchange formats, a batch plotting system and the import of existing engineering CAD documents into SAP DMS. These requirements were also fulfilled with CIDEON tools: the CIDEON Conversion Server, the CIDEON Output Management for SAP DMS and the CIDEON Import PDM.

After the decision for a pilot implementation with SAP DMS, SAP PLM integration for AutoCAD and the mentioned CIDEON tools the project approach had to be defined. The external project partners are SAP Belgium and CIDEON .

For Borealis it was very important that the transfer of functional and technical know-how for the Borealis Project Team was given.

In order to fulfill this requirement interactive workshops were planned. That meant that the project team members had the occasion to explore the possibilities of the different software components with the support of CIDEON and SAP consultants.

Even this project approach took more time and external resources than the “traditional” implementation approach this proceeding had been chosen by Borealis as their major goal was to build up a deep know-how of the planned solution. As a deep know-how of the Borealis project team members was built up the final roll-out was planned without of the support of the implementation partners SAP and CIDEON.

This procedure had been consequently pursued during the different project steps and had also been one of the components for a successful realisation of the project.

As previously mentioned one of Borealis major business requirements was to integrate their external contractors as a high percentage of the engineering work is done at by them. By using the CIDEON Collaboration tool an additional client installation for the external engineers was not necessary as the access has been secured via Citrix solution.
That means that the external engineers will have access to SAP DMS and the CIDEON tools via Citrix. Engineering documents can easily be exported and reimported back again. As a specific Borealis enhancement it can be chosen if the status “exported” is set or not. When they are set to “released” status an other CIDEON tool starts working: the CIDEON Conversion Server. As the status “released” is set a PDF file is automatically created in the background and linked to the corresponding DIR.

The implementation of the CIDEON Collaboration tool was not only beneficial for Borealis and their external contractors. The Collaboration tool was further developed because Borealis has given a lot of input for this.

The result
After a successful pilot implementation the solution was presented to the Borealis management and the business and the decision had been taken for a “go” for the solution. Related to the CIDEON tools Borealis went for a corporate license policy in order to guarantee all Borealis locations access to the CIDEON tools without any limitations in users or e.g. output when using the batch plotting system CIDEON Output Management for SAP PLM.

During the pilot implementation the Borealis project team gained a profound know how of SAP DMS and the CIDEON tools that the roll out to the first Borealis locations was mostly done by Borealis themselves and only minor support was needed by the implementation partner SAP and CIDEON.

The roll out throughout the several Borealis location is still going on and the Borealis project team is in regular contact with the CIDEON team thus it is still an efficient and productive exchange of thoughts and experiences between Borealis and CIDEON.

www.borealisgroup.com