RTE Brings SAP Shop Floor Applications Fully In-House With Neptune Software.
See how IT Director Henrique Valente and his team took full ownership of the SAP shop floor applications supporting RTE’s manufacturing operations, from bicycle assembly to other production processes, without relying on outside developers.
The Challenge
RTE is one of Europe’s largest contract bicycle and e-bike manufacturers, producing more than a million bicycles a year, including its own e-bike brand, Beeq, from production facilities in Portugal and Poland. Its manufacturing operations span multiple processes, from painting and the production of components such as rims, forks and frames to final bicycle assembly. On its production lines, RTE can turn out up to 90 bikes per hour per line (630 per hour total). At that pace, the SAP transactions and shop floor applications supporting these operations have to move as fast as production does.
Henrique Valente, IT Director at RTE, is accountable for the company’s entire IT environment: infrastructure, networking, and cybersecurity. Every change to a shop floor application or SAP process used to mean bringing in outside developers, which slowed RTE down and left the team dependent on external resources for work that was core to its own operations.
RTE needed a way to build and maintain its own SAP shop floor applications internally, across its manufacturing environment, without adding risk to production where every stoppage counts.
“My responsibility is to be accountable for the infrastructure, networking, cyber security, etcetera. So all the IT environment is under my responsibility.”
— Henrique Valente, IT Director, RTE
The Solution
RTE turned to Neptune DXP, Neptune Software’s native low-code platform for SAP, to bring application development back in-house. Because Neptune DXP runs natively inside SAP rather than bolted on through middleware, RTE’s own IT team, not an external partner, could pick it up, build with it, and keep it running.
“With Neptune, we were able to reach our goal of internalizing all the development and maintenance of SAP and shop floor applications that are currently in Neptune.”
— Henrique Valente, IT Director, RTE
The Results
- Full in-house ownership. RTE’s IT team now handles 100% of the development and maintenance of its SAP and shop floor applications, supporting processes across its manufacturing operations and ending its dependence on outside developers for day-to-day changes.
- A stable platform built to keep the line moving. “Neptune proved as well to be very stable and to be very easy to maintain. That is an important factor as well,” Valente explains. It is a critical requirement across RTE’s manufacturing operations, including production lines capable of producing up to 90 bikes an hour, where downtime is never an option.
- A foundation for reuse and standardization. With development in-house, RTE is now working to standardize and reuse code across applications. “We want to be able to reuse more, to create standards in the company and to be able to reuse more code from application to application, and we believe that it could be a very nice quick win in the near future,” says Henrique.
About RTE
RTE – Pinturas e Montagens Industriais, Lda. is one of Europe’s leading bicycle and e-bike manufacturers, producing more than a million bicycles a year from facilities in Serzedo, Portugal, and Brześć Kujawski, Poland. Alongside manufacturing for major international bike brands, RTE builds its own e-bike line, Beeq.
