SAP software drives BMW's success

BMW's flagship UK manufacturing plant is ready to meet demand for its latest model, thanks to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

The German car manufacturing giant's £320m engine factory in Birmingham is capable of producing an engine every 30 seconds for the new BMW 3 Series Compact which will be launched in April.

The site's use of R/3 software from SAP is critical to ensuring its success, according to business systems manager Matthew Bennett.

"This is the first BMW engine factory to be built outside Germany and Austria. The most important thing for us is to keep engine quality at world class levels, so we need benchmark processes supported by integrated IT," he said.

The three-year implementation of the SAP software had to be ready for the first engine to be produced in January.

By 2003, more than 350,000 engines will be made every year at Birmingham for export to vehicle assembly plants in Germany, South Africa and the US. Some 500 of the 1500 staff will be regular users of the SAP software.

The factory, which opened on 8 February, was built from scratch, and its management had complete control over how they would use the software. Bennett says the hardest part was agreeing the working practices that SAP would support.

"Some 95 per cent of the people here are engineers," he said. "When you put them in a room they want to discuss how things work, but you have to decide first what you want to do. It took us about six months to learn that."

Bennett thinks he should have been tougher on users who were over-ambitious about what they wanted. "People always want more than they need. Training and more training is the only way to get it right," he explained.