TKMS: Navigating Complexity. Improving Business Decisions.

 

Customer Story – thyssenkrupp Marine Systems
Headquarters
Kiel, Germany
Founded
2005
Company Size
7,800 employees
Industry
Defense / Marine
Products
Leading European system provider for non-nuclear submarines, naval ships, and new above- and underwater technology.

Challenges

  • Who does what and why? TKMS aims to better assess project statuses. Changes in the value chain, including their impact on the entire company, should be transparently represented, simplifying collaboration with partners on large projects.
  • Operate more efficiently: The goal is to digitally represent and analyze the entire company from a business perspective.
  • Finding the right application: Excel cannot handle the complexity of TKMS’ project and process landscape, and traditional Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) programs focus too heavily on IT rather than business needs.

Outcomes

  • Clear data landscape: With Aras Innovator, business processes, applications, organizational units, and corporate goals can be documented and interconnected, creating a knowledge database.
  • Better decisions through AI and machine learning: Connections between the process landscape and goals are automatically identified and analyzed.
  • Eliminating duplicates and blind spots: Processes become more transparent, data quality improves, and knowledge gaps are closed for all company employees.

Explore This Story

    thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) is a world leader in conventional submarines and a pioneer in the development of new surface and underwater marine technologies. The global corporation provides solutions for military and civilian customers, including submarines, state-of-the-art surface combat ships like frigates and corvettes, and specialized ships like mineclearance and research vessels. TKMS stands for high technology and engineering excellence.

    TKMS operates in 60 countries and is represented in Germany with sites in Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, and Emden. The company’s goal: to be Europe’s most advanced naval enterprise.

    €2.1 billion

    70%
    in revenue for the fiscal year 2020-21 of NATO’s non-nuclear submarine fleet originates from TKMS

    TKMS leveraged the flexibility of Aras Innovator to build an innovative set of Enterprise Architecture (EA) solutions that combines the power of a digital thread with modern AI to provide a better understanding of the company as a whole.

    “With Aras Innovator, we represent our company structure in all its facets. We get a comprehensive view where competencies, organizational structures, and processes are mapped and interconnected. We clearly see how information, objects, and processes interact. This continuity and visibility help manage complexity and identify control elements in a targeted way.”

    Dr. Kira Giesecke, Head of Value Chain Strategy, thyssenkrupp Marine Systems

    Pain Points

    TKMS faced the challenge of optimizing its internal processes. Orders needed to be processed more efficiently to better meet the growing demand for marine capabilities in a shifting global security landscape.

    The main objective: more transparency through precise analysis of internal value chains. This project became even more relevant with the involvement of large-scale corporate contracts from various consortium projects, where different companies—each with their own process chains and decision-making paths—must collaborate. Using programs like Excel proved insufficient for the complex networking of business processes, applications, and organizational units. The solution lay in an unconventional adaptation: Aras Innovator, typically used for traditional product lifecycle management (PLM) use cases, became the foundation for an innovative approach to managing Enterprise Architecture.

    Requirements for the IT System

    The project began with a business-oriented perspective: how are information flows interconnected within the business? Which organizational unit must interact with which process? What effects do even minimal changes at the start of the process chain have downstream? To answer these questions, the new application had to offer analysis capabilities, open interfaces, and options for AI integration in addition to basic data management functionalities. The flexible data model and core platform capabilities of Aras Innovator, along with its powerful low-code development platform enabled TKMS to build an EA solution that:

    • Establishes a central data repository for all process and application information
    • Fully integrates information like business processes, roles permissions, and organizational structures
    • Can evaluate projects, identify redundancies, and consolidate information for strategic decisions
    • Enables AI-based analyses to identify blind spots and weaknesses in the company

    This new Enterprise Architecture application needed to integrate with existing tools without replacing them.

    “The technical implementation of Aras Innovator as an Enterprise Architecture tool was efficient thanks to Aras’ low-code approach. The real challenge lay not in adapting the system but in data collection and conceptual architecture, i.e., the precise definition of data relationships and their strategic importance. The system is becoming a central element of our knowledge management and allows us to simulate strategic decisions to improve efficiency.”

    Sascha Olesch, Principal Enterprise Architect, thyssenkrupp Marine Systems

    Successes with Aras Innovator

    Leveraging Aras Innovator as the digital thread backbone of their EA solution, TKMS achieved a strategic breakthrough in digitalizing the company. Aras Innovator serves to manage and interconnect all relevant corporate information while opening the path to new efficiency gains through targeted AI integration.

    Over 6,000 defined business processes can be analyzed at the touch of a button using machine learning. The AI-based analysis function automatically identifies connections between company goals and operational processes. A scoring system evaluates the accuracy of AI-based mappings, systematically closes information gaps, and continuously optimizes the underlying data model.

    An in-house chatbot provides employees with intuitive access to the company’s collected knowledge, establishing the foundation for an innovative approach to knowledge management. The system understands the context of inquiries and delivers precise, relevant information from across the company.

    Results with Aras Innovator as an EA Tool

    Combining Enterprise Architecture modeling with AI-driven analysis enables much more precise and agile project management. Where connections were once hard to identify, now, even with very complex issues, data-based and targeted decisions can be made.

    Looking to the future reveals even more potential: TKMS is working on further AI-based use cases to automatically detect supply chain bottlenecks, adjust project plans, and autonomously initiate countermeasures. Furthermore, the potential Enterprise Architecture capability with product lifecycle management opens powerful new opportunities to streamline operations and accelerate corporate innovation.

    The successful integration of corporate processes and structures combined with AI analyses positions TKMS as a digital transformation pioneer in the industry. Aras Innovator has proven to be a solution that supports day-to-day operations and provides the foundation for a long-term technology vision for the company.

    “The benefit lies mainly in our improved ability to assess the impact of changes because we can now see the entire process chain. In the past, we initiated optimizations that were locally successful but ultimately disappointed at the end of the value chain. With Aras Innovator, we’ve closed the information gaps and now see the bigger picture. This allows us to simulate the possible effects of decisions from the beginning to the end of the process chain.”

    Ralf Kieselbach, Head of Product Lifecycle Framework, thyssenkrupp Marine Systems
    Download PDF