Stuttgart/Walldorf, Germany. At an executive meeting, Porsche and SAP now have sealed a new strategic partnership. For several decades now, the sports car manufacturer has been successfully using products from the software company based in Walldorf near Stuttgart. To allow each partner tap into the expertise and experience of the other, Porsche and SAP have together set themselves the goal of driving forward co-innovations in order to jointly develop new solutions for the digital transformation.
“I am convinced that this type of partnership is exactly what we need to promote innovations in Germany,” explains Lutz Meschke, Deputy Chairman and Member of the Executive Board for Finance and IT at Porsche: “Our aim is to jointly realise new ideas. This will be benefit not only our two businesses, but other companies as well.” According to him, SAP is an important partner for Porsche. Both companies have already rolled out many ground-breaking projects together. Meschke mentions the order management system PIA as an example of this. “Based on these excellent experiences, we decided to take our collaboration to a whole new level,” comments Meschke. The strategic partnership will focus on data-driven business models, artificial intelligence and an end-to-end process-driven architecture. The partnership is not just about developing new ideas; existing projects will also be integrated into the collaboration.
“Porsche is synonymous with performance and innovative power worldwide,” confirms Christian Klein, Co-CEO of SAP SE: “As part of our strategic partnership, we want to build on the many promising joint projects to continue developing the standard in the automotive industry. The roll-out of S/4HANA at our strategic partner Porsche has high priority for us and we are looking forward to collaborating on many joint developments, which will be closely integrated via the SAP cloud platform.”
SAP and Porsche have initiated a “Board of Architects” to exploit the full potential of this partnership. The objective is to improve networking by communicating closely on a business and technology architecture level in current programmes. This cooperation on a strategic level is designed to optimise the mutual benefit of both companies in the long term.
“Our aim is to be a close partner of Porsche throughout the digital transformation process in order to make a joint success of this,” explains Dr. Daniel Holz, CEO of SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG: “From the very start, we have broken new ground in this strategic partnership with Porsche. Design thinking is a core element of our work together and we have managed in just a short space of time to focus on the right issues and take a solution-oriented approach. This is a best-in-its-class collaboration model.”
