Engineering conglomerate Siemens has completed an eight-year global IT harmonisation project that will see 60,000 users served under a single integrated IT system.

Codenamed Spiridon, the project was an attempt to cut IT costs by up to 60 per cent by streamlining more than 250 SAP R/3 systems in more than 60 countries.

“Across 12 operating groups this global implementation endeavor achieved 90 per cent standardisation at the regional level and resulted in up to 50 per cent reduction in SAP-related IT costs,” the company said in a statement.

The project was partly overseen by recently appointed UK chief information officer Alan Feeley, who was global shared services director at the firm with responsibility for Spiridon across North-West Europe. Feeley initiated IT and process standardisation activities across Siemens worldwide.

“All Siemens’ UK businesses are on SAP R/3 under the Spiridon project,” said a spokeswoman.

“The local Siemens operating companies share not only an IT platform, but standardised business processes, master data and organisational elements.”
The system is operated through eight applications management datacentres worldwide, which use ITIL management processes to provide a uniform service.

Spiridon comprises 12 SAP modules including sales and distribution, financial management and customer service, and interfaces with more than 40 systems to deliver consistent data coverage for business processes.

The project started with the design and building of a global template on which regional templates could be based before localised systems were rolled out.
Though said to be completed, Siemens said total IT standardisation will be realised across all regional companies after an upgrade to SAP’s ECC 6.0 version, scheduled to complete in 2010.

Objectives included minimising the SAP implementation costs by reusing regional and global components and applying a proven rollout methodology.