ENERCON ensures key financial data is available 24/7

• Financial documents must be retained for 10+ years
• 24/7 archive availability required for audits
• Up to 5,000 invoices received daily
• Aimed to reduce data center costs by migrating to cloud

Combating climate change demands a fast transition to modern, renewable energy, and ENERCON GmbH aims to accelerate the move to sustainable power generation. A German-based market leader in wind turbine design and manufacturing since the mid-1990s, the company operates in Germany, Brazil, India, Canada, Turkey and Portugal.
 
To keep its production lines rolling smoothly, ENERCON depends on an efficient back office. In the company’s finance function, accounting specialists use SAP® S/4HANA applications to help process key documents such as purchase orders, supplier invoices and delivery notifications.
 
As Timo Feldner, project manager at ENERCON IT Service GmbH, explains, “Every day, we receive between 2,000 and 5,000 invoices, around 400 of which are in paper format. Our regulator in Germany requires us to retain copies of financial documents for 10 years, so for compliance purposes, we create digital copies of all our invoices.”
 
For almost two decades, ENERCON relied on an on-premises deployment of OpenText™ Archiving and Document Access for SAP® Solutions to help it deliver reliable, long-term retention of financial documents.
 
“Our financial document archiving workflows are similar for electronic and paper records. We use optical character recognition [OCR] to capture data from PDF as well as scanned paper documents, which then flows into SAP. Next, we leverage the OpenText solution to back up the data to an immutable storage platform,” explains Malte Coordes, IT engineer at ENERCON IT Service GmbH.
 
To drive operational efficiency, the company looked for a way to move its archiving services to the cloud without disruption.

“ENERCON has embarked on a cloud transformation initiative, and we saw that moving away from on-premises archiving would deliver many advantages for the organization,” comments Feldner. 
 
“In particular, the cloud would reduce the cost and complexity of delivering high availability for document archiving, since we would no longer be responsible for infrastructure management and maintenance. The cloud also promised fast and fine-grained scalability. For example, allowing us to rapidly support new business users without the lead time of provisioning, deploying and configuring new systems in our data center.”