How Suominen Unified Global Maintenance with MaintainX and SAP

Suominen is a leading manufacturer of nonwoven products for household, medical, and industrial applications. With plants on three continents, keeping maintenance and asset management aligned was a critical challenge. Solving it meant finding a single system that could standardize work execution, track asset health, and improve visibility across every site.

The right solution would accomplish two priorities:

1. Unify work execution across plants 
2. Integrate cleanly with SAP ECC, their system of record for parts inventory and purchasing data

MaintainX delivered on both counts.

Why MaintainX

Suominen chose MaintainX for its ability to deliver immediate value for maintenance and asset management while meeting several key requirements:

• A cloud-based platform for distributed teams to work from
• An interface designed for frontline technician adoption
• Multilingual support for a global workforce
• Dedicated support throughout implementation, integration, and go live
• Clean, reliable data flow and governance between MaintainX and SAP ECC

Integration scope

The MaintainX rollout began with Suominen’s production site in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The integration connected maintenance work with SAP ECC, including vendors, parts, and work order-related parts consumption. Parts and vendors created or updated in SAP ECC synced into MaintainX, with SAP as the source of truth. 

Suominen defined specific expectations for transaction timing and data flow. Rather than waiting until a work order closed or for batch syncs every 15 minutes, parts consumption needed to update SAP the moment a work order moved into progress, with inventory reflected back into MaintainX in near real time.

Implementation

Suominen's SAP environment was hosted on premises, which added infrastructure and security complexity to the project. Success required tight coordination between the MaintainX integration team and Suominen's infrastructure, security, and business teams.

One key decision kept the project on track: Suominen provided broader access to the data needed for the integration early in the development process. This gave MaintainX room to build and test the connection, avoiding bottlenecks and development delays as the final access model was put in place.

Despite the complexity and coordination across teams in Europe and North America, the integration launched on schedule and error-free. From requirements gathering through System Integration Testing (SIT), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and go-live, the rollout took approximately 3.5 months, excluding weekends and holidays.

Results

Suominen is expanding MaintainX across other sites, with Green Bay as the deployment standard.

While it’s early in Suominen's multi-site rollout plan, the integration is already reducing manual reconciliation and keeping records aligned between MaintainX and SAP. Operations, finance, and supply chain teams now have a consistent, real-time picture of plant floor activity. 

Standardized operations and clean data practices also lay the foundation for future migration from SAP ECC to S/4HANA.

What this means for manufacturers evaluating a MaintainX-SAP integration

Suominen's deployment shows that a MaintainX-SAP integration can be executed successfully in a complex enterprise environment. 

For teams considering a similar integration, here are some of the practices Suominen followed for a smooth rollout:

• Align on requirements and goals. Define your operating model, data ownership, and integration objectives before the work begins.
• Plan for scale. Are you building toward one CMMS/EAM strategy across multiple plants? The answer will determine your path forward.
• Establish clear data ownership. Vendors, parts, and inventory data need a source of truth. Ambiguity here creates reconciliation problems later.
• Bring the right people in early. Infrastructure, security, and technical teams should be involved from the start to avoid surprises.
• Sequence access controls to support the build. Locking down access too early slows configuration and validation. A phased approach balances security with delivery speed.
• Stay engaged on both sides. Successful enterprise integrations depend on fast decisions and active participation on both sides. The faster teams can unblock each other, the better.

Ultimately, what made the integration work were clear requirements, the right stakeholders, and shared commitment and trust on both sides.