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2020 marks a cornerstone for be one solutions, as we welcomed our two first clients for S/4HANA, SAP’s intelligent, integrated ERP system, specifically designed for the headquarters of large enterprises and multinational companies. As SAP rollout expert, we already have a proven track record when it comes to SAP Business One and are very enthusiast to finally be able to create one for S/4HANA as well. Let’s dig into it!

A Sophisticated S/4HANA Opportunity Operated by be one solutions

Our client is a 350-million-dollar organization, heading 84 subsidiaries, that was using SAP Business All-In-One, from which they migrated onto S/4HANA cloud. We won three distinct contracts with them.

The first project we acquired underway was about three S/4HANA cloud modules implementation: finance, procurement and project system. The issue list linked to the implementation was long and complex so we started working right away on it. Some of the problems were related with the financial and consolidation, group reporting. The implementation was not very successful in those modules and there was – and still are – a lot of issues around consolidation & group reporting. Therefore, due to the poor implementation, the customer ended up with a considerable list of issues. Some could have been resolved by the previous partner, others were only solvable by SAP. Our main job before finishing the rollout, was to get in and fix those complications. To tackle this job, we built a dedicated team around the encountered problems: a finance person, a procurement person, a project person, a developer, and a basis. This project team is working on a daily basis with the customer’s key users since late February’20

Additionally, we worked on a second project: the implementation of the sales and distribution module of S/4HANA cloud with one of the subsidiaries of our customer, based in Austin, Texas - while its headquarter is based in Miami, Florida. As mentioned before, this client has a high number of subsidiaries, which means that consolidation and group reporting for all of these is quite complex. One of these is this services company, in Texas. A specific team was also built for this project, with a focus on the sales and distribution expertise and is currently working on meeting the planned deadline to go live in July.

The third project concerned loan management. As a business, our client build solar farms and manages all their projects through bank financing. The complexity was that S/4HANA cloud, does not offer a standard solution for loan management and waterfall management - waterfall on the context of loans. Therefore, they needed us to develop a customization on top of S/4HANA cloud, using the SAP cloud platform to manage the loans for the loans to cascade from the headquarters down to its subsidiaries. To fathom the complexity of this project, one must keep in mind that these businesses are growing every month and new companies come on board frequently: every time they start a new project, it means creating a new company.

There is still a good road to go on these three different projects and there are a lot of expectations but “So far, the customer is happy with us.” assessed Mario Rui Candido - Account and Project Manager, and Americas Regional Manager. “We had an episode about covid-19, where the Miami office had to be evacuated but the resources were tested and came negative. A couple of days later, they enter working remotely.” he mentioned when asked about the impact of the current health crisis on the projects.

Quickly after the breakout, be one solutions‘ employees were only working remotely with every customer all over the world. Although, this wasn’t new for us – working remotely is our bread and butter. We do this every day with every customer, but the customer itself working remotely -they are still learning how to adapt to that. As a matter of fact, “we are doing more progress since we are working remotely than when we were working on site”, Mario shared – even though it is certainly not the same with all costumers.

Spotlight on S/4HANA Discovery and Application Management Services

This second customer is a multi level marketing company selling hair and beauty products which was using SAP Business One and migrated to SAP S/4HANA on premise a year ago due to a huge jump of their business. Yet, the S/4HANA implementation was problematic.

With operations in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland and Poland, they grew exponentially their business within a year from being a 40-million-dollar company to being a 400-million-dollar one; which is an impressive growth for this kind of business. Now, some of the processes they had a year ago weren’t fit anymore for this massive expansion. The system not being sized to support such a huge advancement plus, a high turnover - 80% of the people that knew the implementation processes left the company – let our client with a colossal challenge with only a very few key users left to know how the system works or what are the SAP best practices. On the scope of their operation, there's a multitude of different systems (50!!!) doing so many things that the overall landscape of systems is very complex. SAP is not the only system and it is not even the major business driver – an e-commerce solution is (which is being migrated to a new solution while we write this article).

We started at the beginning of March’20 a discovery project. A discovery is an audit and assessment of the system to understand how well the solution was implemented, how it is being used, and to identify issues and opportunities to improve. It's composed by interviewing key users, head of departments, the different subsidiaries, I.T., the previous partner – whom was very cooperative with us while knowing they were about to be removed from the AMS, which is our second contract with this client.

“We are now in the final stage of the discovery: we have finished the sessions that were rescheduled or cancelled these past weeks and delivered the documentation – in which we proposed solutions and recommendations for improvement. We will then start working on the AMS project with the current partner for the next three months. After this period, our expectation to take over the AMS entirely and start brand new contracts, following up on the discovery’s suggestions” concluded Mario.

Both these clients and their diverse projects contribute to place be one solutions as an highly trusted and efficient SAP implementation partner. If you are looking to adapt your ERP to the quick evolution of your business, contact us now.