Client: Tremonia Mobility GmbH
As a former part of the Mercedes-Benz family, with long-standing experience in the automotive industry, Tremonia is starting a new, successful era with its production site in Dortmund (Latin: Tremonia). Here, 230 employees produce customized premium minibuses for public transport and individual travel. Originally exclusively based on a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter chassis, since the takeover by Aequita in 2022, additional base vehicles (e.g., from Volkswagen) are now being used. Additionally, the development of a fully battery-electric bus for public transport is in focus.
Furthermore, Tremonia offers spare parts and service packages to ensure the quality of its products in the future.
The goal of the Dortmund-based company is to achieve market leadership in high-quality minibuses by providing sustainable, fuel-efficient, and durable vehicles.
Initial Situation and Challenges
For the transition from a corporate structure to an independent medium-sized company, all processes, IT infrastructure, and previously used software solutions must be analyzed for their future viability. In Tremonia’s case, the continued use of SAP was not suitable for the company’s size, which is why a new ERP system was implemented. After its introduction, the data from SAP had to be migrated accordingly, resulting in high complexity. The effort to map data from one system to a new one is considerable and requires detailed process analyses. In this context, processes were optimized and adapted to the new company size, achieving leaner and more efficient information flows.
Another major component was the establishment of a completely new IT infrastructure, where a very progressive approach was chosen with a focus on the cloud.
Since Tremonia was separated from a corporation, the company did not have its own IT department.
For this reason, another goal was to establish an internal IT department with the appropriate know-how.
Solution
With regard to a carve-out from global corporations with processes and systems built up over decades, a greenfield approach in such scenarios offers the opportunity to reduce complexity, modernize processes, and increase productivity.
This is where the newly developed Smart Business approach comes into play, which was applied in the carve-out of Tremonia Mobility GmbH.
In contrast to the classic IT carve-out, where existing IT systems are often migrated unchanged, the focus of Smart Business is on understanding current business processes, from which the planning of a comprehensive transformation can be developed. From this, potential is identified, whereby IT and business are newly linked through IT business management, and maximum benefit is gained from the new synergies.
As part of the introduction of Smart Business, a new mindset must be created that ensures that familiar procedures, techniques, and systems are set aside, and existing work methods are broken up and changed as part of a greenfield approach. Instead of migrating existing systems one-to-one as before, all applications were comprehensively evaluated in the Tremonia project and, where possible, replaced with new solutions. Care was taken to ensure that the new applications are cloud-based and that as little customization as possible is applied during implementation to best represent the new best-practice processes. An example of such a change was the historically complex, SAP-based legacy ERP system, which was replaced by the ‘ProAlpha’ solution. This is an ERP system tailored for medium-sized businesses that brings best-practice business processes in its standard version and enabled a rapid implementation. In a second phase, the best-practice processes were compared with the old processes, thus achieving an optimization of future processes.
Furthermore, the Smart Business concept emphasizes a modern infrastructure, which is reflected in Tremonia’s hybrid cloud-first approach. The result is an almost 100% cloud infrastructure through the use of Microsoft Azure solutions. The opportunities and strengths here lie not only in leaner processes but also in increasing company productivity and economic efficiency, as usage operates on the pay-as-you-go principle, eliminating unnecessary fixed costs. As a further advantage, data availability is optimized by allowing access to it independently of location and simultaneously by multiple people. The latter, in turn, favors modern forms of work such as remote working, which overall leads to more agility and flexibility.
Data protection and security are also extensively guaranteed, as the security of the infrastructure is enhanced through integrated backup systems, constant security updates, and disaster management. In the area of personal devices, all landline phones across the company were replaced by smartphones, which are provided by the supplier ‘Everphone’ according to the ‘Phone-as-a-Service’ principle. The procurement, configuration, and shipping of each desired mobile device is managed through a portal.
In view of the very short TSA runtime, thanks to good collaboration between Aequita, Tremonia employees, service providers, Daimler, and digatus, an advanced transformation of Tremonia Mobility GmbH was achieved.
Customer Benefits
Through years of expertise in IT project management and the modern strategy developed from it, which was used in the carve-out, Tremonia Mobility GmbH was able to achieve independence in a very short time.
Both the ERP system and the IT infrastructure were modernized and optimized. By initiating further future-oriented solutions, such as serverless printing, the company is well on its way to further reducing costs, increasing economic efficiency, and at the same time lowering the risk of failures – entirely in line with a successful medium-sized company.
Tremonia Mobility GmbH will continue to drive progress not only in mobility but also in the IT sector by pursuing the Smart Business approach.
“With digatus by our side, we carried out the carve-out in record time and with great success,
which would never have been possible without good collaboration. There were no problems, only challenges that we mastered together.” Boban Radulovic, IT Director Tremonia Mobility GmbH
Christoph Pscherer
He has been working in the IT environment for almost 30 years, gaining experience in various roles and areas. Through his years of experience as a Service Manager, he knows the challenges and needs on the customer side. He has been applying this deep understanding and knowledge at digatus for more than eight years. As Head of BU IT M&A and Transformation, he and his team support all IT topics along the value chain of M&A projects. This includes due diligence, carve-out, and integration projects.
