Pilot courage

SAP S/4 Hana Cloud Implementation at ANWR Group

With a billing volume of 19.8 billion euros, the ANWR Group, headquartered in Mainhausen (Hesse), is one of the most successful and highest-turnover retail cooperatives in Europe. The cooperatively organized group of companies optimizes processes and provides trading and communication platforms for independent retailers. Around 20,000 medium-sized companies are affiliated with the ANWR group of companies.

ANWR Group, through its subsidiary DZB Bank, provides the financial service of central settlement for its affiliated dealers and suppliers. For historical reasons, an R/3 system was shared by the trading cooperative and the bank. Due to the highly customized SAP R/3 and the underlying bank-specific regulations, new requirements of ANWR could hardly be implemented. To break this dependency, the decision for separate systems fell on S/4 Hana Public Cloud during the search for a successor system for ANWR. 

In the existing heavily customized on-prem predecessor, updates were hardly possible. With the return to standard, the effort for the semi-annual updates of the public cloud product remains manageable. Accountants and bookkeepers can make settings or create views for which they previously relied on IT support. The standardization of processes means that changes, for example due to legal regulations, only have to be implemented once.

The migration took place in nine waves, with one group of national companies being converted to the S/4 public cloud system per wave. The project was completed on time at the turn of the year 2021/2022. This was also successful because the S/4 transformation was a joint project of IT and the Financial Accounting and Controlling business units, supported by SAP partner Camelot ITLab. The heads of these areas formed the project steering committee of five experts.

Range of functions in the standard

One learning from the project is to examine core functionalities in more detail in the analysis phase, as a standard product can have functional limitations. At the same time, there is a risk that 60 percent of the project will already have been completed in the analysis phase - which hinders rapid implementation. It is important here to strike the right balance between checking the requirements on the one hand and having the courage to resolve open points in the project on the other. That's why it's important to limit the project to important or critical processes. Once they have been defined, it is important to work with the business department to find out whether the requirements that have been elicited are the right ones and whether they are all necessary. In the ongoing project, an agile approach is recommended in order to develop pragmatic workarounds for missing functionalities.

Another learning from the project is the high relevance of change management. As with every S/4 implementation, there were changes for the daily work of the accountants and bookkeepers. Changes that need to be explained and communicated. The start of the 18-month project also coincided with the first Corona lockdown, making the project largely remote. Thanks to Camelot's remote experience, this did not come at the expense of project success. Two measures proved to be particularly helpful: the participation of technical colleagues in the overarching project coordination and addressing specific questions to the key users.

In order to keep to the tight project schedule, it was important that the employees in each wave followed along. After encountering reservations in the first live walks, from about the middle of the project, the accountants of the current wave participated in the weekly project reviews. They were explicitly invited to ask questions and express reservations. This gave the project team an unfiltered impression of the status of implementation. 

A nice side effect: Through the joint work sessions, the specialist employees experienced that those responsible from the financial accounting and controlling departments and IT were working toward the same vision. The concrete addressing of errors and questions also helped to reduce reservations. To this end, the accountants collected errors, questions and ambiguities in a list, and twice a week the key users discussed these points with the entire team. As a result, errors were quickly found and checked. The communication effort paid off: the employees' questions were answered reliably and quickly as a result of the two measures. The employees felt better heard in the event of reservations and better involved overall.

Courage to follow through

At the start of the S/4 public cloud rollout, there were hardly any pilot projects of comparable size. Thus, the project became a pilot. The project team was encouraged to do this by the shared vision and the rapid coordination among themselves: The project leaders worked very closely together and agreed on clear responsibilities, goals and priorities - for example, that it must be possible to post payments at any time. The ongoing coordination ensured that the project team was always able to act. This was essential so that the project could be completed in the planned time. 

Furthermore, even in difficult project phases, there was no dissent between the areas, but concrete solutions were found together. For example, the connection to the already existing SAP HCM as HR system was more complex than one would expect within an ecosystem. Here, Camelot implemented a near-standard solution on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) to cover the missing standard functionality. Through a clever integration on the Cloud Platform Integration (CPI), a modification of the standard processes in the respective systems could be avoided and the requirements could be met.

A wish in the direction of SAP: In this phase of the project, closer support would have worked in favor of customer satisfaction, and SAP could have learned for subsequent customer projects with similar system constellations. It would be conceivable, for example, for SAP to automatically classify pilot projects as preferred-success projects at no cost to the customer.

In the meantime, the migration to the S/4 Public Cloud has been completed for almost a year and is running satisfactorily. In the first places, the workarounds carried out in the project have been completely returned to the standard with the processes supplied by SAP in the standard, and processes have been synchronized and standardized across the national companies. It is clear that it pays to keep at it and to iteratively improve the system after the initial migration. As a result, release upgrades are now hardly any work at all.

The expectation is that this reduction in complexity will pay off in the next three to five years. After initial reservations, the feedback from the departments is also positive: although many of the controllers and accountants had been working with the old system for years, they find the current process-oriented user interface much more pleasant after a short period of getting used to it. For example, they no longer have to open multiple windows to view and edit related data. Instead, the system guides them through the process much more consistently.