Business Challenge

For a global software and networking company, provided technical team leadership and transitional services for a large scale SAP ECC Functional Upgrade / Re-implementation. The Finance Team's objective was to simplify their use of various SAP data objects in order to reduce redundancy and improve reporting accuracy. The Supply Chain Management (SCM) team's objective was to redefine their Material Master for the purpose of significantly reducing master data maintenance and to implement a broad range of improvements in the SD arena and move towards a ‘touch less’ order.

The client had struggled for two years trying to revitalize their productive SAP environment until their project was re-staffed and turned around beginning in March of 2009. Responsibilities included leading the RICEF scoping efforts for the development team as well as the follow-on conversion testing and cutover efforts. Given the complexity of going live in an existing landscape and the number of conversions involved, the cutover plan had over 1,000 steps and required seven days of downtime for execution.

Results

  Conducted numerous meetings with functional team members to identify the RICEF objects needed (and associated complexity) in order to scope the work required by the project team.

  Coordinated and helped deliver cross team / system data integration as a result of numerous conversions and interfaces running on multiple technical platforms.

  Reported on cross platform technical team status at weekly status meetings.

  Conducted multiple “mock” conversion and cutover testing cycles to ensure the integrity of our go-live process.

  Incorporated various IT controls and signoffs in the cutover plan to confirm acceptance of the results by the business.

  Coordinated critical fix activities post go-live.

  Supplied various consultants to the project team in order to augment the skills needed by the client (including one of the SCM leaders).

Key Considerations

For this process to be successful, the following functionality upgrades were required:
 

Finance Functionality Upgrades

  Simplified use of Profit Center, Cost, Center, Functional Area and Business Area.

  Reduced redundancy between the CO-PA, PCA, General Ledger and Consolidations modules.

  Enhanced operating expenses reporting.

  Simplified, more timely, and more accurate for internal and external reporting.

  Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) to be used to analyze sales and gross margin.
 

Supply Chain Management Functionality Upgrades

  Simplified material SKU number process.

  SAP needed to calculate the sales order pricing.

  Costing Runs should be generated to calculate the standard cost of the material BOM.

  Stock transfers (inter-company) to be processed.

  On-line quotes and price lists to be available to partners.

  SD Pricing condition records significantly reduced (95% reduction achieved).
 

Given the above functionality changes, numerous data structural changes occurred via twenty plus conversions. All of this occurred within the live existing system landscape.

Client Profile During the Project

  Annual revenues of over $1.5 billion

  Offices in multiple countries worldwide

  Over 4,800 employees worldwide