IBM has announced that Grundfos, one of the world's leading pump manufacturers for industrial purposes, heating, water supply and wastewater, has selected IBM Information Integration Solutions to create an integrated information management environment that delivers precise and trusted customer, material and supplier information to its business processes and SAP applications.

Grundfos is undertaking a comprehensive master data integration project to become more flexible and responsive to changing market conditions as demand increases. At the heart of this technology transformation is the new IBM Information Server, a first-of-a-kind software platform that will analyze, cleanse, transform and deliver trusted information for Grundfos, which runs one of the largest SAP R/3 implementations with more than 6,000 users across 40 companies in 25 countries.

"Our company relies upon accurate and trustworthy data, so in order to ensure we get the right order at the right time to the right customer, it is essential to have a single version of information to drive all our business transactions," said Karsten Sørensen, vice president, Information Service, Grundfos. "IBM Information Server enables us to take complex data from SAP and other data sources and make use of it throughout the organization while trusting its quality."

Represented by 73 companies in 41 countries, Grundfos Group depends upon the availability and reliability of all customers, material and supplier information across its worldwide network.

For example, Grundfos has three sales companies in Germany with different product groups and needs to seamlessly merge and share knowledge about common customers to capitalize on up- and cross-selling opportunities. Additionally, Grundfos needs to minimize the cost of maintaining three separate customer databases. Grundfos is using IBM Information Server to provide master data integration services for customer sales data, along with enabling similar initiatives for customer data quality, material data quality and supplier data quality throughout this master data project.

"Key business initiatives, such as the Grundfos's project to harmonize heterogeneous master data from SAP and other data sources, cannot succeed without effective information integration," said Pete Fiore, vice president, IBM Information Integration Solutions. "IBM Information Server is built from experience with more than 5,000 customers and allows organizations to turn complex, heterogeneous data into trusted information to drive new innovation, increase operational efficiency and lower risk."