Leading Global Manufacturing Organization — EMEA

Challenge

A few years ago, a leading global manufacturer of 50,000 employees, instigated a world-wide digital transformation in an effort to streamline their IT infrastructure costs and fund future growth initiatives. With each function and subsidiary of the giant organization operating in its own unique way, the organization wanted to harmonize both IT systems and business processes across the company, with SAP S/4HANA the proposed centralized system of choice. The aim was to transform the organization’s landscape from operational units working in silos to an integrated global enterprise working in a single SAP instance. The timeline for the transformation of the 170+ operational markets was set for four years or less.

Solution

Working with Syniti, SAP, and system integrator IBM, a new SAP project roadmap was designed to deliver globally, on-time, within budget, and with very minimal disruption to operations.

Syniti, the data partner in the approach, deployed SAP Advanced Data Migration by Syniti as the tool of choice to orchestrate the migration of hundreds of legacy systems onto the single SAP S/4HANA instance. Data Quality was naturally a key focus area. In the finance and operational functions in particular, the project integrated and automated many business-critical processes to drive improved data quality, cataloguing, and overall governance in the new S/4HANA implementation.

Outcome

The organization successfully went live, on-time and on-budget as a result of the highly-defined roadmap and data orchestration, with business upside realized in 30% greater balance sheet gains vs. projected business case, and 50% greater P&L gains vs. business case projections.

With better data, the organization now has a enhanced view of how money is spent at all levels of the organization. For example, procurement staff now have greater visibility of current and future material requirements preventing over- or under-stocking with smarter inventory management. By reducing total stock and spare sparts, enabled by standardized data and naming conventions, the company cut logistics and storage costs, releasing the desired capital for growth initiatives. Previously, some spare parts sat around unutilized for years.

In addition, quality control within the organization has increased, as has the ability to adhere to complex industry regulations because of better data cataloguing.

To summarize, the implementation of the program has enabled the organization to act, as intended, as a globally integrated enterprise, focussing its resources in a targeted way to maximize sales and profitability. The improved trend data sourced from SAP S/4HANA has also enabled the company to identify new opportunities and substantially accelerate time-to-market in a very competitive industry.