The long-term scientific cooperation of the Harz University of Applied Studies and Research and the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg in the field of Business Informatics, especially on the issue SAP, celebrates its 15th anniversary. Both universities founded this cooperation back in the year 1997, beginning with an analysis of the medical and custodial procedures at the University Hospital Magdeburg by Business Informatics students of the Harz University of Applied Studies and Research under the management of Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Scheruhn.

Beginning from 2005, the cooperation that is important for both universities was intensified under the direction of the SAP UCC Magdeburg. Students of Business Informatics at the Harz University of Applied Studies and Research initially analyzed the ITIL-Compliance of the UCC Magdeburg. This project was the starting point for five further joint projects in the field of Education Service Providing up to the present day. All those projects had the common goal to implement the whole process-lifecycle, which reaches from the acquisition of business goals on the basis of information models to the implementation of a prototype by means of SAP- and Software AG solutions. Therefrom derived a number of bilingual application systems, for example for the event management, which are used by more than 3,000 cooperation partners at the more than 400 universities worldwide that are connected to the UCC Magdeburg.

Prof. Dr. Scheruhn has been holding classes at the OvGU Magdeburg since 2003. In the year 2007, both universities created an international Master's programm ((Master of Business Informatics) in cooperation with the Florida Gulf University. In the following years, the basic idea of this publication was unrolled and conducted in the context of several short-term professorships at universities in Spain, Cuba, and the USA.

Since 2010, both universities have been developing case studies of the globally active company Global Bike Inc. (GBI) and the midsize company ALMIKA Holding. The model repository underlying the case studies was synchronized with the SAP Solution Manager and is suitable for the group-level as well as for the midsize-level.

The further development of these case studies is planed for the future. In this context, scholars aim to analyze to what extent the information content of the model repository is suitable for the creation/the answering of automatically generated general knowledge questions. Furthermore, an analysis of the SAP Solution Manager concerning the possibilities of an automated performance-, quality- and cost-monitoring of the GBI-processes is planned. Further future projects are joint investigations concerning the topic of sustainability on the basis of a Sustainabilty Balanced Scorecard, jointly conducted TERP10-certifications, cooperative doctoral research projects and joint research labs.

„Cooperations between the universities support the transfer of know-how in both directions. This is valid for the OvGU as well as for the Harz University of Applied Studies and Research..“, sais Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Inf. Stefan Weidner, general manager of the UCC Magdeburg.