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View from the Top - Part 1 |
Part 2
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PROFILE
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Stephan Madlung
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Company: Lufthansa Cargo.
Interviewee: Stephan Madlung.
Job Title: Head of Integration
Competence Centre, Lufthansa Systems.
The Subject: EAI and development
technology is playing a central role in modernising
Lufthansa Cargo’s business processes.
PERSONAL FILE
NAMES: Stephan Madlung.
BACKGROUND: Stephan leads
the Integration Competence Centre of Lufthansa Systems.
As a project manager and consultant in the IT Consulting
division of Lufthansa Systems, his consulting activities
include IT strategy, IT architecture and EAI/integration
strategy and implementation.
At Lufthansa Systems, Stephan helped
pilot EAI at Volkswagen, ran the EAI selection process
at Lufthansa Cargo, built the Lufthansa Systems EAI/Integration
Competence Centre, defined EAI standards and guidelines,
and architected and helped to implement more than 13
EAI projects at Lufthansa Cargo.
Previously, he was director of IT
development at New Horizons Computer Learning Centres
Franchise Master in Germany, a computer learning franchise
network, and before that a team leader/consultant at
Unilever.
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Q: WHAT FIRST LED LUFTHANSA CARGO TO INTRODUCE
INTEGRATION TECHNOLOGY?
A: The logistics market is experiencing large growth and
in 2001/2, Lufthansa Cargo was facing an increasing number
of shipments and also wanted to integrate more closely with
its customers and partners, especially the large freight forwarding
companies. Customers expect more flexible contracts and all
the time new ideas and new requirements need to be brought
to market. Against this, the company’s IT systems were operating
at their limit.
In logistics, even more than other businesses, the automation
of processes is a key success factor. At Lufthansa Cargo,
IT became a barrier to growing the business. This led the
company to review all its processes – from its booking to
handling processes, right through to revenue accounting. It
looked at both the ‘is’ and the ‘to be’ processes and estimated
that it would take three years to get from ‘is’ to ‘to be’.
Lufthansa Cargo wanted to achieve excellence in all its business
processes by 2006 and set up continual improvements of processes.
In IT, it wanted a state-of-the-art system and saw that its
business processes and IT must be tied as closely together
as possible.
I work at Lufthansa Systems which is the overall IT provider
at Lufthansa Cargo. We carried out a study and found Lufthansa
Cargo had a variety of heterogeneous systems and an overall
lack of integration. The company runs 50-plus applications
including some standard applications such as SAP and Siebel
and lots of custom-developed applications. The whole data
management lacked integration. There was redundant data storage,
for example, and gaps in IT support for the overall business
process chain.
We decided the start point was to define a strategic IT architecture.
We took a layered approach – with this, the goal was to increase
flexibility, to provide faster support from IT to the business
and to achieve cost reductions.
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Copyright © 2004
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