Quality-by-Design at Wintershall Dea

Wintershall Dea's roots go back 130 years: the predecessor companies Wintershall and DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG were among the pioneers of the gas and oil industry in Germany. Both companies repeatedly set trends with their technical knowledge and expertise, while at the same time consistently developing their portfolios. From the second half of the 20th century, they also became increasingly involved internationally and secured complex licenses worldwide. Since the merger in 2019, the journey has continued together as Wintershall Dea.

When Björn-Oliver Rettig joined Wintershall Dea as Vice President, IT Service Operations in 2019, the experienced SAP expert took on large, complex, and demanding tasks. Rettig is an advocate of an automated IT value chain that goes beyond the SAP area. In an IT department with almost 100 employees, the greatest potential, but also a major challenge, lies in successful cross-departmental coordination.

Mission

He soon introduced the Conigma™ Suite to support and automate this coordination as part of the IT value chain and make it more transparent for everyone involved, thereby initiating a change in Wintershall Dea's complex IT landscape.

"With the Conigma™ Suite, Galileo is the only provider with whom I was able to achieve my zero-defect target using the best-of-suite approach from a single source. With Conigma™ CCM, all overwritten transports were eliminated completely automatically; with Conigma™ Connect, we were able, for example, to integrate ServiceNow as an enterprise management system bidirectionally and in an audit-compliant manner into our SAP-centered value chain."

For his work at Wintershall Dea, Björn-Oliver Rettig had set several core objectives for SAP-focused IT at Wintershall Dea:

Firstly, he wanted to establish a legally compliant and transparent IT governance structure. It was particularly important to him to ensure robust internal documentation, as this was not yet available in Wintershall Dea's multi-provider setup with numerous outsourced IT services.

In addition, his aim was to significantly reduce time-to-market and automate the entire process lifecycle management. A particular focus was placed on security and intefrity in transportation management - especially with regard to transport sequencing issues.

At the same time, standard tasks for key users without an IT background - for example in accounting or processing - should be simplified and made accessible without creating new sources of error.

Benefits & solution

The Conigma™ Suite from Galileo Group AG was a suitable solution for these challenges, as an internal evaluation by Wintershall Dea showed.

The aim of introducing Conigma™ CCM as a change, release and transport management add-on tool was to enable process governance "by design". Where previously, for example, transport conflict checks were carried out manually or only partially automated, today the four-stage transport conflict management of Conigma™ CCM not only ensures automated transport conflict detection, but also automated correction, i.e. ensuring the correct sequence of transports.

Björn-Oliver Rettig is particularly enthusiastic about other innovative components of Conigma™ CCM that support his goal of "quality by design" - for example, DevSync. The component supplements existing tools such as SAP Retrofit with a three-way merge mechanism that enables targeted and tool-supported selection of development proposals. As the component is fully integrated into the standard process, no changeover was necessary for the developers, and everyone involved remains consistently up to date.

The next step was comprehensive optimization by connecting the second large ecosystem, ServiceNow, bidirectionally via a no-code iPaaS integration platform. Here, too, strong governance was important to Björn-Oliver Rettig and was to be realized through a highly flexible toolset that enables the dynamic control of process owners directly via ServiceNow.

In the development environment, the transport quality has been significantly improved. Transports are only carried out if a corresponding ServiceNow ticket has been created; another example of the "quality by design" principle.

Procedure

Due to the intensive and convincing preliminary evaluation, a proof of concept was intentionally skipped. Instead, the two-stage rollout began immediately: Conigma™ CCM was implemented first, followed by Conigma™ Connect. The implementation was based on half-day scoping workshops in which the workflows were defined in detail, including an integrated ABAP test cockpit connection. Not only the internal processes within the SAP/IT team were considered:

"For me, 'process governance from the service requester to the service recipient' means that, in addition to SAP and ServiceNow teams, key users from business departments as well as partners involved in the managed service model must also be integrated," says Rettig.

Specially trained key users should be able to carry out simple SAP changes independently without involving the IT department, thereby improving time-to-market. In addition to SAP, the multi-provider landscape at Wintershall Dea also includes other international IT service providers, for example for application management.

"IT employees, business users and external partners now work under a common governance model that is adhered to 'by design'," explains Rettig. "One of the key strengths of the Conigma™ Suite is its ability to execute complex requirements quickly and with precise control. Instead of relying on costly and high-maintenance custom developments, even complex workflows are implemented purely by customizing."

Conclusion & Outlook

After the introduction of the Conigma™ Suite, process quality increased significantly, as Rettig emphasizes: "The introduction was a complete success. There were zero findings in the current audits, and the issue of transport overwrites is a thing of the past!" Björn-Oliver Rettig, now CIO of Wintershall Dea, hopes that the new owner will continue the IT strategy that has been started, as all activities will be relocated from Germany to the UK as part of the current acquisition by Harbour Energy (UK) of a significant stake in the company.