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BEYOND ESSENTIALS
Eight sites. Seven countries. Three continents. Underneath all of that, on day one, Catensys had one internal SAP team to call on: none. More than 300 SAP and IT users found out what that gap felt like in real time.
It gets the keys to its own SAP system before it has the staff to drive it. That's what happened to Catensys, a chain-drive manufacturer spun out of Schaeffler in 2022 – with no internal IT team to support its more than 300 SAP and IT users worldwide.
"We have 8 sites worldwide in 7 countries – with around 600 employees in total," says Björn Bodenstein, Global Head of IT at Catensys. The closing was signed. The systems weren't yet fully separated. There was no team to maintain them.
It's one of the SAP customer success stories we keep coming back to, because the gap it had to close is one most mid-market companies will recognize.
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Through UNITED VARS, the strategic alliance of hand-picked local SAP market leaders, Catensys was quickly able to operate again – without having to build up their own resources at short notice.
Rather than hiring an in-house department from scratch, Catensys plugged into Global Application Management Services: one shared ticketing portal, 24/7 Follow-the-Sun support, and local SAP expertise positioned across Germany, China, India, South Korea, and the US – wherever a Catensys site needed it.
The headline numbers tell part of the story: "We save 20 - 40% with Global AMS compared to building an in-house IT team," says Axel von Bauer, CFO at Catensys. That saving comes alongside eight strategic IT projects – from EDI roll-outs to a PLM rollout – running in parallel instead of queueing behind break-fix tickets.
Most mid-market companies never go through a carve-out. But almost every mid-market SAP customer faces some version of the same question: how do you get global, around-the-clock SAP coverage without the headcount of an enterprise IT department? Catensys answered it by borrowing structure instead of building it – an alliance already positioned in the markets where the work needed to happen.
The mechanics behind that answer: the knowledge transfer through All for One, lead project member, that replaced an internal IT team, the barcode scanning solution built from scratch in China by QZing, one of our Chinese members, and the cost math that made it all add up – are each their own story, worth a closer look.
Catensys also tells this story on camera, walking through the carve-out, their decision in favour of the UNITED VARS alliance, and what changed for their team from day one.
Catensys needed knowledge transfer that didn't lose anything in translation, one ticket queue across every site, and someone on the ground in Nanjing who could train an operator in their own language, in person. That's the standing structure of our strategic UNITED VARS alliance: local SAP specialists already operating in the country where the work has to happen, coordinated through a single point of contact rather than four separate contracts.
A single SAP partner can be excellent in its home market and still be the wrong fit the moment a mid-market company needs Erlangen, Nanjing, and Bangalore covered at once. That's the gap UNITED VARS is built to close: the right local expert in every market a carve-out, or any mid-market SAP customer, actually operates in.
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