Customer: Tremonia Mobility GmbH
As a former part of the Mercedes-Benz family with a long experience in the automotive industry, Tremonia starts into a new, successful era with the production site in Dortmund (lat.: Tremonia). Here, 230 employees produce customized premium minibuses for public transport as well as individual touring. Originally based exclusively on a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter chassis, other base vehicles (e.g. from Volkswagen) have been added since the takeover by Aequita in 2022. The company is also focusing on the development of a fully battery-electric bus for public transport.
Furthermore, Tremonia offers spare parts and service packages to ensure the quality of its products in the future.
The Dortmund-based company’s goal is to become the market leader in high-quality minibuses by providing sustainable, fuel-efficient and durable vehicles.
Initial situation and challenges
For the change from a group structure to an independent company in the SME sector, all processes, the IT infrastructure and the software solutions previously used must be analyzed for their future viability. In Tremonia’s case, the continued use of SAP was not suitable for the size of the company, so a new ERP system was chosen. After its introduction, the data from SAP had to be migrated accordingly, which resulted in a high level of complexity. The effort to map data from one system to a new one is considerable and requires detailed process analyses. In the course of this, processes were optimized and adapted to the new size of the company, resulting in leaner and more efficient information flows.
Another major component was the development of a completely new IT infrastructure, whereby a very progressive path was chosen and the focus was placed on the cloud.
Because Tremonia was separated from a corporate group, the company did not have its own IT department.
For this reason, another goal was to establish an internal IT with the appropriate expertise.
Solution
With regard to a carve-out from global corporations with processes and systems that have been 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, which was applied in the carve-out of Tremonia Mobility GmbH, comes into play.
In contrast to the classic IT carve-out, in which the existing IT systems are often migrated unchanged, the focus of smart business is on understanding the current business processes, from which the planning of an all-encompassing transformation can be planned. Derived from this, the potential is identified, whereby IT and business are newly linked by IT business management and the maximum benefit is gained from the new synergies.
As part of the introduction of Smart Business, a new mindset must be created, which ensures that familiar procedures, techniques and systems are set aside and existing ways of working are broken up and changed as part of a greenfield approach. Instead of migrating existing systems one-to-one, as was previously the case, all applications were comprehensively evaluated in the Tremonia project and, if possible, replaced by new solutions. Care was taken to ensure that the new applications were cloud-based and that as little customizing as possible was applied during implementation to best reflect the new best practice processes. One example of such a change was the SAP-based inventory ERP system with high historical complexity, which was replaced by the “ProAlpha” solution. This is a mid-market oriented ERP system that brings best-practice business processes with it as standard and has enabled rapid implementation. In a second phase, the best-practice processes were compared with the legacy processes and thus an optimization of the future processes was achieved.
Furthermore, the smart business concept emphasizes a modern infrastructure, which is reflected at Tremonia in a 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 an increase in company productivity and cost-effectiveness, as use is on a pay-as-you-go basis, which eliminates superfluous fixed costs. Another advantage is that the availability of data is optimized, as it can be accessed by several people at the same time, regardless of location. The latter in turn favors modern forms of work such as remote working, which leads to greater agility and flexibility overall.
Data protection and security are also comprehensively ensured, as infrastructure security is enhanced by integrated backup systems, constant security updates, and disaster management. In the area of personal devices, all fixed-line telephones throughout the company have been replaced by smartphones, which are provided via the provider “Everphone” according to the “Phone-as-a-Service” principle. This involves managing the procurement, configuration and dispatch of each desired mobile device via a portal.
In view of the very short TSA term, a progressive transformation of Tremonia Mobility GmbH was achieved thanks to good cooperation between Aequita, Tremonia employees, service providers, Daimler and digatus.
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 within 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 profitability and at the same time reducing the risk of failure – all in the spirit of a successful medium-sized company.
Tremonia Mobility GmbH will continue to drive progressiveness not only in mobility, but also in IT by pursuing the smart business approach.
“With digatus at our side, we managed the carve-out in record time and with great success,
which would never have been possible without good cooperation. There were no problems, only challenges that we overcame together.” Boban Radulovic, IT Director Tremonia Mobility GmbH
