Welcome to this blog post! In today's edition, I want to share a practical SAP enablement story from the German-speaking SAP community – featuring Elementar Analysensysteme GmbH and their implementation partner Cideon. This story originally aired as a special German-language episode of the Inside SAP HANA Cloud podcast.

No time to read? Listen to the full episode on https://url.sap/941u5n Spotify or https://url.sap/bq5x0x Apple Podcasts.

In this blog, you will find out how a mid-sized, owner-managed manufacturer:

• Replaced a fragmented ERP/PDM landscape with a unified, SAP-native approach
• Used SAP Engineering Control Center (ECTR) to eliminate synchronization overhead between product development and logistics
• Chose a single implementation partner to reduce coordination friction and avoid the classic “blame game”
• Built the data quality and process discipline needed to scale adoption step by step
• Laid the groundwork for mechatronics integration and AI-enabled automation

This story is relevant for any engineering or manufacturing organization that is grappling with the handoff between product development and SAP S/4HANA – and wondering how to make that transition stick.

Meet the Participants

• Dr. Sebastian Schmitt – Head of Product Development, Elementar Analysensysteme GmbH
• Peter Vandrey – Head of SAP Solution Management, Cideon (SAP and Autodesk partner, specializing in PLM integrations)

Company Snapshots 

Elementar Analysensysteme GmbH is an owner-managed company headquartered in Langenselbold near Frankfurt, with around 320 employees worldwide and a second production and engineering site in Manchester. The company develops and manufactures analytical instruments for elemental analysis, stable isotope analysis, and optical emission spectrometry – built for long service lives of ten to twenty years. Their customers range from contract laboratories and pharmaceutical companies to wastewater treatment plants, food analytics operations, and research institutions. Elementar does not operate as a project business. They develop series products – which means data consistency, lifecycle traceability, and smooth handoffs between engineering and production are not optional: they are central to the business model.

Cideon has been an SAP development partner since 1996 and an Autodesk partner in parallel – covering software sales, consulting, and training. In the SAP space, Cideon's focus is on PLM integrations: specifically, the interfaces between engineering environments and SAP S/4 HANA, spanning on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud scenarios.

The Starting Point: A New ERP, No PDM, and Many Moving Parts

In 2021 and 2022, Elementar rolled out SAP S/4HANA (private cloud) – a major transition for the entire company. They were coming from a small ERP system with no clearly defined PDM system in place. In the legacy environment, data exchange between product development and the rest of the business relied on a web of manually maintained interfaces and synchronizations.

The go-live decision was deliberate: rather than waiting until every process was perfect, the team went live with SAP S/4HANA first – and then immediately launched a follow-on project to define how product development data would flow into SAP going forward. As Dr. Sebastian Schmitt puts it: “We needed to create awareness in my area around data: data quality, data management – how you handle data overall. Those are just a few of the challenges, and they shouldn't be underestimated.” This step-by-step approach – stabilize first, then improve – turned out to be one of the key success factors of the entire engagement.

Success Factor #1: Listen First, Understand the Process, Then Decide on Standard

When Cideon came on board, the first priority was not to configure software. It was to understand how things actually worked. As Sebastian describes it, Cideon's team “sat down at one table and talked through: how do workflows and processes work today, and how should they improve? Then they listened a lot at first, which I personally appreciated – because we could describe the current situation and where we had seen gaps and problems with the old systems.”

Only after that listening phase did the team begin mapping what could stay close to standard – and where adjustments were genuinely necessary. This approach avoided two common failure modes: over-customizing too early (before understanding the real process) and under-delivering (implementing a generic solution that doesn't fit the actual workflow). The principle here is broadly applicable: the best SAP implementations start with process transparency, not feature deployment.

Success Factor #2: One Partner, One Accountability

A recurring theme in Elementar's story is the conscious decision to work with a single implementation partner – one who could cover both the CAD/Autodesk side and the SAP side. In Sebastian's words: “In the past we always had many partners we had to work with, connect with each other, or who communicated with each other through us. We didn't want those friction losses anymore.”

From Cideon's perspective, this structure also changed the dynamics of the project itself. Peter explains: “The kind of blaming no longer happened. So it wasn't ‘the other partner from the CAD side is to blame,' or ‘no, it's SAP.' None of that.” Instead, both sides worked from a shared understanding of the target process – and took joint ownership of outcomes.

For organizations evaluating implementation partners, this is a practical point worth taking seriously: the coordination overhead of managing multiple vendors is not just an administrative burden. It creates real technical risk, because nobody has a complete picture of the end-to-end process.

Why SAP Engineering Control Center (ECTR) Made the Difference

The concrete tool at the center of this story is SAP Engineering Control Center. For Elementar, ECTR addressed a specific and fundamental challenge: moving data between product development and SAP without running it through external interfaces. In the legacy world, engineers worked in a PDM system and then “transferred things into an ERP system” – a phrase that covers a large amount of manual effort, synchronization logic, and potential for error. With two engineering sites (Langenselbold and Manchester), harmonizing versioning rules, release workflows, and data structures across that landscape was especially complex.

The insight that changed the picture came when the team stopped thinking of ECTR and SAP as “two separate systems talking to each other” – and started recognizing that they share one data foundation. Sebastian describes the practical result: “When you want to release a material, in the end it's one click, not a synchronization via complex interfaces.” Engineers no longer notice the automation running in the background – which is exactly the point. The system supports the process without adding visible overhead.

This shift – from interface-heavy synchronization to a shared data foundation – is the core of what ECTR enables. And it has downstream effects: fewer integration points to maintain, less manual reconciliation, and more time for the actual work of product development.

What's Next: Mechatronics, More Automation, and AI

Both Elementar and Cideon are clear about the direction of travel.: he next frontier is mechatronics: bringing mechanical and electrical engineering data together in a unified model. As Peter puts it, “Engineering Control Center is well suited for that, because it allows me to connect multiple systems and link data from both systems.” For a company like Elementar – which builds highly complex analytical instruments where “one doesn't work without the other” – this is a natural next step.

Sebastian adds a broader point about automation: the goal is to reduce the time engineers spend manually assembling and searching for information. “Now we can say: the system supports us, and we can focus much more on the tasks we actually need to do as a company.”

AI is also on the horizon – specifically, the ability to run analyses against data that already exists in the system. Rather than treating AI as a separate capability to be added later, both speakers frame it as a natural extension of the data discipline and system foundation already being built.

One important principle that Cideon emphasizes for organizations just starting this journey: don't try to do too much at once. “First you should make sure that, on the customer side, users can cope with the system – learn to work with it – rather than implementing so much from the start that nobody knows what the system is doing in the background. First really learn to work with the system, then bring in improvements step by step.”

This is enablement as a practice, not a one-time event.

Enablement Takeaways

1. Start with understanding, not features. Listen to the current process, make gaps visible, and only then decide what can stay standard and what must be adapted.
2. Reduce friction through clear accountability. A single partner who covers the full scope eliminates the coordination overhead and blame dynamics that derail complex implementations.
3. Data quality is a prerequisite, not an afterthought. Product data needs ownership, shared definitions, and active governance – or the processes built on top of it won't scale.
4. Use integration to eliminate synchronization. The value of ECTR becomes tangible when approvals and releases happen directly in the system – not through interfaces.
5. Enablement is iterative. Build user confidence first. Then expand capability step by step, especially in complex engineering and logistics scenarios.

I hope you liked this summary of our special German-language episode of the Inside SAP HANA Cloud podcast.

Stay curious and keep tuning in! Follow me on LinkedIn and stay up-to-date with our latest enablement assets: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annette-garcia-lorenzo.