Failing SAP Programme Kickstart
Helping a regional professional service company kick start its failing transformation programme.
The Challenge.
Tier 2 European professional services company with 5 major operating companies in the region was seeking to migrate on to a common target operating model encompassing Pipeline management, Order to Cash, Fulfilment, IFRS1Revenue Recognition and Record to Report. Whilst all op-cos had major levels of process commonality, there were differences in customer size and markets as well local legacy internal controlling and accounting processes. None of the op-co’s had documented the as-is operating model or defined their required outcomes for the new operating model, the C suite had agreed to adopting a hybrid SAP standard operating model but without seeking or providing any context as to how this would be achieved or organisational differences aligned. Like any professional service company, the number one cost commodity is labour and the customer sought to establish internal continent worker interoperability and put in place new processes and controls to mitigate revenue leakage.
The programme had stalled as the approach was to adopt the operating model of the largest operating company and convert this to a regional template residing upon a new Group vanilla SAP system. C level resistance to this approach and lack of global process owner empowerment led to the target operating model not being approved and the programme stalling
The One Eighty Approach.
We advocated an evidence based discovery approach whereby over a two month period a detailed assessment was made of each operating companies operating model, local statutory requirements, process pain points, levels of process automation, process controls, reporting outcomes, resourcing model, process outsource model, business support (COE) model and ITIL model. (Each operating company was mapped to SAP at process level 4.)
The End Result.
We provided the C Suite leadership and CFO with the following key deliverables / outcomes:
a full summary showing the close alignment of all 5 operating companies and the fit to SAP S4 Hana. The use of Azure and Power BI for analytics, localisation requirements which would be delivered by way of Azure micro services opposed to SAP Business Transformation platform and future state enterprise architecture and ITIL model.
a detailed requirements traceability matrix loaded in to JIRA and an organisational business change impact assessment.
defining the future state operating model based upon process and resource interoperability.
provided a list of tangible business benefits that could be achieved to fund the programme.
an alternative strategy to move the current 5 legacy ERP systems on to a Azure platform, retain the current Legacy ERPs systems and ways of working and instead adopt a SAP Central finance hub system (2 tier ERP) to manage and consolidate regional record to report achieving the digitalisation of the Finance function but with vastly reduced business impact.
Our rates are extremely competitive, offering excellent value for money especially considering the significant financial and reputational cost of programme failure. Contact us today to discuss how we can help your programme.