FES Optimizes Data Management

Employees of Frankfurter Entsorgungs- und Service (FES) GmbH empty more than 45,000 trash cans every day. Every single collection from the vehicles of the municipal waste management service provider for the city of Frankfurt am Main is automatically recorded thanks to RFID transponders attached to each waste container and transmitted as a tipping signal to the FES systems. In addition, scheduling bulk waste collection dates through a portal, vehicle GPS data, the municipal waste collection calendar, and the business portal all place high demands on FES in terms of integration, data management, and the provision of business-critical data.

After SAP terminated the SAP Cloud Platform (Neo) contract—which FES had been using for data storage and integration—effective in 2028 and announced higher license prices for its successor products, the SAP Cloud Platform (Foundry)—the company began searching for an alternative. FES identified this solution through a comprehensive, vendor-neutral request for proposals, which resulted in a combination of the CAS Realtime DataHub (CAS RDH) data platform and the Lobster_data integration solution.

With CAS RDH, FES gains a flexible data hub for storing and providing data in real time, independent of its SAP ERP system. Thanks to intelligent data management via the Lobster Integration Platform, FES plans to load only the data needed into its SAP ERP system in the future—thereby consistently implementing the “Keep the Core Clean” principle.

With the implementation of solutions from CAS AG and Lobster, FES is also enhancing its security against external attacks. Two Lobster_data systems are used for this purpose: an external system to which portals—such as the one for scheduling bulky waste pickups and the one for commercial customers—are connected, as well as third-party systems, including the one used to record tipping signals. Only data that has been explicitly approved via whitelisting reaches another internal Lobster system, which then distributes this secure data to CAS RDH and SAP ERP.

“With CAS RDH, we can flexibly provide data via automatically generated standard interfaces—it’s much easier than it used to be in SAP,” says Philipp Weimann, an in-house IT consultant at FES. Lobster’s solution is also easier to use than SAP’s integration platforms—the graphical mapping support makes it possible to make changes quickly.

The CAS AG consulting team provided valuable support to FES during the migration from the SAP Cloud to the new architecture consisting of Lobster and CAS RDH. “The CAS AG team is always there for us with knowledgeable contacts; they’ve kept their promises and haven’t promised anything that wasn’t feasible,” says Stefan Kowalski, an in-house SAP consultant at FES, praising the consultants. The advice was always spot-on. Last but not least, CAS AG has effectively supported the FES team in taking on more and more tasks on its own.

FES would like to continue working with the consultants at CAS AG in the future as well. The waste management and cleaning professionals in Frankfurt now plan to further optimize their data management through event-driven data loads—and are once again relying on the expertise of the specialists at CAS AG for this project.

Source: This article originally appeared on Open PR