At voestalpine Stahl GmbH, the "production technical elaboration" (in German FTA) – i.e. the addition of production-relevant information to a customer order – is carried out automatically for each customer order item. In the process, individual customer specifications are taken into account and production is optimized. After many years of operation, the FTA contains the accumulated knowledge of production specifications and now repeatedly reaches system limits.
The aim of the "FTA2.0" project is to transfer the FTA program and the associated business rules from the previous production planning system (PPS) to the new SAP system landscape. This will ensure operation and further expandability.
With the FTA2.0 project, two decisive and, above all, forward-looking improvements in terms of user-friendliness for voestalpine – which have also already found their way into subsequent projects – were developed on the basis of SAP-Ui5:
More than 100 colleagues from project management to specialist department to development are involved in the implementation of the new tool. "After 3 years, a change to the home office and back again, we have jointly created a completely new, user-friendly and future-proof application," says the project manager from voestalpine group-IT GmbH.
The transition from the old system to the new FTA2.0 takes place during operation and is fluid. In a parallel phase, the results of both systems are compared. Detected errors are corrected. Only when it has been ensured that FTA2.0 has reached the same level of maturity as the old system will the preparation of new customer orders be switched to FTA2.0.
Soon, the "old FTA on the PPS" will be able to go into well-earned retirement.
Statement Project Manager Department voestalpine Stahl GmbH:
The FTA2.0 project creates the conditions for the production engineering department to be ready for all future challenges.
