KKAEFER SE & Co. KG, headquartered in Bremen, is a provider of industrial services with a portfolio spanning insulation, access solutions, surface protection, passive fire protection and interior outfitting. KAEFER’s teams work with clients across Industry, Marine & Offshore, and Construction, providing reliable and efficient technical industrial services. With an annual turnover of around €2 billion, the company takes pride in its extensive workforce of over 30,000 skilled professionals worldwide and is managed by Dr. Roland Gärber (CEO), Karsten Wirth (CFO), and Sandro Barrach (COO). They have been using SAP since 2014.
The business template of KAEFER’s SAP solution was scheduled to be rolled out in France in spring 2022. Early on in the project, the company decided that employees at the French sites should log in to SAP in French. A translation component was therefore added to the project planning.
KAEFER uses a variety of standard SAP transactions as well as transactions that were developed in house. These Z transactions had been developed in English and now required a French user interface. There were also texts that had been added to various Customizing tables, which users encountered not only in Z transactions but also in SAP Standard ones.
Impressed by their know-how, range of tools and transparent approach, the company chose LUDECKE to handle the translations. Using its tools, LUDECKE conducted an initial analysis to identify all Customizing entries that had been created so far and to analyze all Z transactions that needed to be translated. During this analysis, they automatically identified which texts were used by the Z transactions and included these in the project planning, along with the texts from the required Customizing tables.
After that, it was only a matter of determining which of the identified Customizing tables actually needed to be translated. KAEFER had already done some preliminary work on this, making it possible to quickly define the scope and ensure it contained all texts that needed to be translated. Thanks to LUDECKE’s translation tools, this stage required minimal effort.
The next step was to perform a comparison with another client in the SAP system that already contained French translations so that these could be reused. This saved unnecessary work and ensured that correct existing translations were preserved.
Gabriel Gringaus, Global Process Expert SAP SD at KAEFER SE & Co KG
After the initial analysis, LUDECKE also handled the actual translating of the English texts into French. The translation was done in the SAP system and was divided into logically coherent packages, such as “Z Transactions Prio 1.” These packages were processed according to priority, with the most important texts being translated first. After each round of translation, the finished translations were checked by the key users in the French office, who also answered the translators’ questions about individual texts during this phase. To facilitate this review, LUDECKE used its tools to export the translations to Excel.
Once the translation phase was completed, the translations were reviewed once again as part of the user acceptance test, this time in the context of the translated Z transactions. LUDECKE provided support here as well, offering best practices for setting up the test system to test the translations, and fixing any remaining translation issues. These issues included a small number of texts that had not been identified by LUDECKE’s tools during the initial analysis, internationalization errors such as hard-coded texts, or simply French translations that needed to be adjusted. The project successfully went live in the autumn of 2022.
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