RTE Brings SAP Shop Floor Applications Fully In-House With Neptune Software.
See how IT Director Eric William and his team took full ownership of the SAP shop floor applications running a bicycle production line that turns out up to 90 bikes an hour, 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 lines in Portugal and Poland that can turn out up to 90 bikes an hour. At that pace, the SAP transactions and shop floor applications running the line have to move as fast as production does.
Eric William, IT Director at RTE, is accountable for the company’s entire IT environment: infrastructure, networking, cyber security. 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, without adding risk to a production line 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.”
— Eric William, 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.”
— Eric William, 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, 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,” William explains. It is a critical requirement on a line 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 William.
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.
