The product portfolio covers electric drives, electronic controls, sensors, and actuators as well as solutions for exhaust treatment. Vitesco Technologies achieved sales of around EUR 8 billion in 2020 and employed just under 40,000 staff at around 50 locations. Vitesco Technologies is headquartered in Regensburg and would like to play an internationally leading role in the electrification of vehicles. To achieve this, the company is pursuing a clear strategy with a focus on sustainability.
Until 2019, Vitesco Technologies was a division of Continental AG. Continental decided to bundle the expertise for drive technology into a separate company. A new industry heavyweight came into being. In 2021, the spin-off became a legal entity: The company had to stand completely on its own two feet. This also affected the IT systems which contribute significantly towards the company's value creation. As a strategic IT partner, T-Systems supports Vitesco Technologies with the setup of its IT landscape and takes responsibility for the business-critical IT systems.
In addition to application management and the operation of the SAP systems, operation and further development of the Windchill system was also required for product lifecycle management (PLM), which will be operated in the AWS cloud. A common data protection concept ensures that all performance is also achieved with a bestshore approach that is compliant with data privacy in accordance with Schrems II.
With end-to-end responsibility for SAP systems, Vitesco Technologies achieves major advantages for continuous IT governance and the integration of systems – with a very streamlined IT team. In this way, all facets of future developments in the system landscape can accommodated at an early stage. This creates a high degree of planning security for Vitesco Technologies. The optimized overall concept with established best practices minimizes the risks and the impact of the switch. Downtimes for both Vitesco Technologies and for Continental have been reduced to a minimum. Thus the migration only had a minimal impact on the business activity. At the same time, the application management concept with its bestshore approach fulfills data privacy requirements in accordance with Schrems II and minimizes the costs for the ticket solution.
With its expertise in migration, in particular its extensive SAP competence, T-Systems led us safely through the spin-off process.
As part of the Continental group, Vitesco Technologies has used existing systems for SAP non-SAP and PLM since it was founded. The spin-off meant that this had to change. Consequently, the first key task was to extract the systems and data from the Continental group necessary for the Vitesco Technologies business activity and to migrate these to a separate platform. When transferring such a large volume of data, system downtimes are unavoidable. In the case of 10 TB, a typical volume, around two or three days of downtime need to be planned in. Minimizing this downtime – both for Continental and for Vitesco Technologies – was the main aim of the project, as well as ensuring the speedy and permanent operating capability of Vitesco Technologies. Because during downtime, neither Vitesco nor Continental are able to keep their production going, control their suppliers, or accept orders – which has a direct impact on the business.
As an operator of the SAP systems for Continental, T-Systems knows the platforms very well. The project partners decided to transfer an identical copy of the complete systems including data for Vitesco Technologies onto their own private cloud landscape. T-Systems designed this infrastructure directly from the outset with its own firewall landscape in line with security specifications and with its own IP address range. This set the course for a later simple “separation” early on. In the private cloud, it was possible to prepare the systems needed for basic operation in accordance with the needs of Vitesco Technologies within two days. With the help of an optimized overall project plan, the runbooks for the migration were painstakingly developed and practiced with over 100 individual processes. The result: minimal downtime for the actual migration. The corresponding data from Continental was removed in stages while Vitesco Technologies was already working with the new systems. The Team at T-Systems took a similar approach for the PLM system, the only difference being that after the migration, there was an additional migration step to dock onto the AWS cloud.
In addition to basic operation, T-Systems also took on the application management for the SAP, non-SAP, and PLM system with incident and change management. In the design of the application management, the team opted for a data-privacy-compliant bestshore approach with a detailed analysis of the incoming tickets. Vitesco Technologies thus receives all SAP services from a single source, from basic operation through to application management. Consequently, all support queries flow into one service desk and Vitesco Technologies receives a consolidated report based on uniform processes. A high degree of automation increases the efficiency of the operation and the continuous further development of the SAP systems.
