Brande / 13 January 2021
In the wake of the merger that the company went through in 2017, Siemens Gamesa had a pressing need for a new and modern IT landscape to help uphold its prominent position in an ever-increasing competitive market. However, this isn’t just your average digital transformation. This is a huge and complex task, and the ambition in Siemens Gamesa is clear; to cut through the clutter and fully embrace new technology and state of the art solutions while also creating a unified, refreshed and strengthened internal IT landscape.
The first steps were taken when the two companies ‘Siemens Wind Power’ and ‘Gamesa’ merged in the spring of 2017. CIO Alan Feeley says: “Since the very beginning, it was clear that a very different technical infrastructure was needed for our future Siemens Gamesa journey. Both legacy companies were operating ageing and outdated technologies and even worse, compatibility was not a given for the future”.
With those first moves, an intense and complex road to become one united company began. With an internal programme ‘SGRE.One’ at the core, Alan Feeley and the rest of Siemens Gamesa is revamping just about everything - from manufacturing floors to back office. It is a digital transformation from within and a complete and total reconstruction of the entire internal IT environment and the foundation on which Siemens Gamesa, and its more than 26.000 employees, are able to work and unfold the company’s potential.
To support on this objective, other major internal IT project initiatives are also running in parallel. Those are projects such as the Agora project, aiming to design and implement the latest global standards and harmonized processes into SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce that will enhance Siemens Gamesa’s client relationships and service management as well as global deployment of Teamcenter that is to be the leading application for creation of innovative wind solutions. These are all future proof solutions that will fundamentally change Siemens Gamesa’s IT landscape.
“We have spent the last 3 years building one of the largest and most comprehensive internal IT Transformation roadmaps that I have ever seen during my 30+ years’ experience. It’s built on cyber and cloud-oriented premises and we are adopting some, if not all, of the market best practices right now”, explains Alan Feeley, CIO of Siemens Gamesa.
Untangling the complexity
Revamping an entire IT infrastructure takes a lot of planning, designing and preparation. Siemens Gamesa has drawn up an aggressive roadmap which undoubtably is a heavily demanding process to accomplish. It is not just about changing one or two things, but all of it!
Because of the far-reaching nature of the internal transformation everything is interrelated, and all initiatives and changes must fit a bigger picture and a future mode of operation. The sheer quantity of topics, the complication of the interdependencies and the necessary continual alignment with many different internal departments is challenging and don’t just happen overnight.
Another essential key vision of this highly intricate journey is the use of off-the-shelf applications. For a company with a prior preference for customizing everything, this is a giant step and an important change of mindset. From a technical perspective, however, untangling essential business processes from the web of deeply ingrained customizations is a further addition to the complexity of Siemens Gamesa’s transformation.
A modern workplace and new ways of working
At the end of the adventure, planned for 2021, Siemens Gamesa is aiming to have a harmonized IT infrastructure with one network, one data center, one laptop setup and one IT helpdesk (to name but a few). So, the company is modernizing the workplace, consolidating and migrating to brand-new data centers, enhancing cyber security and implementing artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to improve operations as well as enhancing the user experience for all employees.
To support this implementation, partnering Infosys, global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, has been selected. Ruchir Budhwar, Senior Vice President & Region Head, Europe, Manufacturing, Infosys, who is also the executive sponsor for the SGRE.One program at Infosys, says following about the journey, “SGRE.One is a Lighthouse program not just in Siemens Gamesa but also in the entire manufacturing industry. Leveraging our technical prowess and knowledge of Siemens Gamesa’s business strategy, we have been able to deliver best-in-class DIGITAL infrastructure for the 25000+ employees. Given the complexities involved due to the scale and breadth of the program, we are extremely proud of what we have been able to achieve in a very short time. Working on this project has been exciting, challenging, and ultimately, very rewarding.”
Setting the stage for the future
Some say the hardest part is getting started on a digital transformation.Those impacted by the
number of changes in Siemens Gamesa might argue that it’s actually enduring the transformation that’s the demanding part. But to support the competitiveness in a fast-developing market environment a such internal digital transformation is crucial for the new future of Siemens Gamesa – as it is for most companies today. And offering employees with a modern set-up that delivers the expected synergies and efficiencies, as well as full autonomy of Siemens Gamesa IT infrastructure, will derive a true competitive advantage to Siemens Gamesa for their digital future.
