09 10 2015 27 STORY In 2014 the management of the PSA Group s retail organi zation decided to undertake a comprehensive restructuring which has been underway since early June In place of the previous single brand operations its company owned retail outlets are now selling all three PSA Group brands Peugeot Citroën and DS Organizationally PSA s retail businesses were previously separated by brand But now the group is merging them into a single legal entity and is centralizing accounting and controlling IT adaptation In the past the Peugeot and Citroën brands sold their cars over their respective retail organizations The two brands do func tion under a common management but there were many dif ferent business processes for each That is why executives since 2014 have been discussing how they could turn their facilities and sales branches into multi brand operations Specifically there should be just one sales branch with several locations in each sales area PSA employees sell all the group s brands there This naturally implies that the in house IT department will adapt the computer system of the retail organization as well as the sales branches to new business processes The IT system supporting our new business processes is the core of our business said Peter Windhoefel PSA s IT director for Germany Its potential for standardization and adaptation to the needs of all the companies within the PSA Group is stra tegically important and we consider it to be a major step into the future In fact the management isn t just replacing two systems For the first time PSA has an integrated IT system that supports new harmonized processes in multiple brand sales This can be a good foundation for multi brand sales in Germany It also makes the IT department a catalyst for the consolidation of PSA s company owned sales branches and naturally for the harmonization of all the processes within the headquarters of the retail organization Italian solution The foundation of the new system comes from Italy When the decision to establish multi brand stores was made the IT de partment in Germany was already looking for a new IT system for its branches An in house software unit had developed the solution based on SAP R 3 During the 2000s PSA installed the system as a strategic solution in the Italian market both in its sales branches and its dealerships But the Italian system could not fully portray the multiple brand concept It in fact involved a classic retail solution One server and one entity per dealership So the first step was to adapt the system in such way that it displayed one entity and one server per brand This was a significant advance over the existing systems But then the IT department was given the requirements for the multi brand sales organization The Italian solution no longer fit the bill That s because each sales branch would have used the technical solution corresponding to a particular brand At this point IT executives realized that the current approach and architecture would not move things forward PSA came up with a logical decision The new system should end up with just one entity for all its brands So the retail organization harmonized its processes for all its brands And with this in mind the specifications were reworked during the next step to sharpen the requirements for the system High development cost Working with external developers the IT department convert ed the two retail systems into one This required relatively ex tensive changes in the master data because just one customer master and one vehicle master will be available from now on The development expense was accordingly quite high The rollouts to the sales branches have been underway since the start of the year The preparations per installation take about four to six weeks In all 14 to 16 persons handle each roll out PSA says In Germany the group puts the number of users at 1 200 spread out across 12 PSA sales branches and their 50 locations across the country At the end of the day the sys tem is supposed to map all the sales organization s processes Among others they include sales all after sales the parts area and the service shop Central controlling and accounting have also been moved to the system with the result that IT execu tives can ultimately expect extensively harmonized processes even in controlling and reporting An important step By Christian Raum Photo PSA Citroen is showing the Aircross concept which is inspired by the C4 Cactus and the legendary Mehari Photo PSA

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