Winterhalter Gastronom GmbH

Connecting SAP and SCHEMA ST4 to Create Multipage Quotes at the Touch of a Button

How do you create tailored sales documents for a customer within minutes when a machine is available in numerous different variants? Winterhalter, a manufacturer of commercial dishwashing systems, uses automated processes for this task by connecting SAP to the content management system SCHEMA ST4.

Now in its third generation, Winterhalter is a family business manufacturing commercial dishwashers. Over 2000 staff work at the company, which is based in Meckenbeuren near Lake Constance. Its warewashing solutions for the gastronomy and hotel industries, community facilities, butcher's stores, and bakeries are manufactured at four production sites.

Previous situation: quotations created in Word

Sales staff at Winterhalter had been relying on Word templates to create quotes for its customers. The data for all the variants and options of the specific machine had to be managed within these templates. At Quanos Connect 2024, Corinna Miller, a technical writer at Winterhalter outlined the company’s conundrum: “Coworkers had to delete and add text for every quote, for example, to amend the technical data. This approach was working well until we planned to launch a new, modular rack conveyor dishwasher in May 2024. It then became clear to us that we would need to completely rethink and overhaul the tools we use for sales tasks.” The high degree of modularity and number of additional options meant it would be too cumbersome for the sales team to have to search through a document containing all the information to find the data they needed. Creating separate documents for each of the 1,000,000 plus possible variants was also not an option due to the amount of work this would involve.

The MTV02 commercial dishwasher in two of its many possible variants.
Source: Winterhalter

The solution: combining SAP and SCHEMA ST4

Faced with this situation, Winterhalter decided to send customer-specific machine configuration data from SAP to the content management system SCHEMA ST4. “We already had all the information we needed. All we had to do in order to create documents using an automated process was connect the two systems,” says Corinna Miller.

But how does this work from a technical perspective?

Winterhalter commissioned the expertise of Carstens + Partner, an agency specializing in technical writing. “A sales employee configures the machine according to the customer’s specifications in SAP. This creates a json file, which is used to exchange data between SAP and SCHEMA ST4,” explains Managing Director Sigi Siegel. “The content management system constantly monitors the folder in which this type of file is saved, imports the file, generates the desired documents, and automatically sends them to the sales employee.“ The files are a configuration overview and the specification text in Word as well as the technical data and the multipage quote as PDFs. The Technical Writing department at the company’s headquarters owns the texts.

Huge time savings thanks to automation

For Matthias Schumpp, Team Leader of Technical Documentation at Winterhalter, the best thing about the automated solution is that the sales documents can be created in three to five minutes based on the configuration in SAP. “Previously this took up to four days, depending on how busy colleagues in the departments were,” he says. Another advantage is that it doesn’t matter which time zone staff from international sales offices are in when they want to create quotes, as the function is available at any time.

If machine data change, such as less water being required due to optimizations, employees can adjust them in SAP. When the next configuration arrives, the new technical data are applied and there is no need to update the documents. “Digitalization and automation have given us the freedom to create documents around the clock, without even having to do anything,” summarizes Matthias Schumpp.

On the horizon: generating operating instructions at the touch of a button

Winterhalter has plans to extend the automated creation of documents to other areas and content elements. The Planning and Project Planning department is already working on automated processes for creating configuration-specific 3D data for architects and planners. Plus, they want to make it possible to produce operating instructions in this way, which would save the Technical Writing department even more time.