Fast template rollout in China

Wagner developed a template to cover the processes of the Decorative Finishing and Industrial Solutions business units. The next step was to roll out the template at the site in China.

The ambitious project required, above all, know-how in global rollouts and comprehensive expertise in the complex regional requirements in China. In particular, this involved specific reporting and the topic of golden tax.

The inorganically grown IT landscape with internationally non-uniform business processes results in high maintenance costs as well as very difficult management and control of the individual units.

The growth strategy defined by management could not be implemented without standardized IT and overarching harmonized processes.

Markus Moßmann, Group CIO at Wagner:

"Our goal was therefore to reduce complexity, establish harmonized processes within the company and create a globally consistent IT landscape."

Up to three rollouts in parallel

The Wagner management has determined to introduce SAP at all locations in the coming years. As a result, up to three SAP rollouts were carried out in parallel at times in 2016.

Wagner's goal was also to reduce the runtime of a rollout and to standardize the processes at all sites. To meet this requirement, a template had to be defined that covered all business processes of Wagner's Decorative Finishing and Industrial Solutions business units.

Deviations from the processes described in the template should only be possible if there are deviating local legal requirements. The aim was to reduce the duration of a rollout to four to five months with the help of this specification.

The template was to contain detailed visual process descriptions, user documentation, customizing cookbook and test definitions for the 70 to 80 most important Wagner business processes.

This documentation reduces the effort during the rollout to determining which processes are relevant for the corresponding unit. In addition, there was only the reconciliation with the respective legal requirements in the country of the rollout.

This also had to be taken into account at Wagner Spraytech (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. The rollout in China was a strategically important project for Wagner, because it formed the prelude and prototype for the further rollout of the template to other regions and continents.

Stefanie Stiefel, Director IT Applications:

"The particular challenge in the China rollout was to reconcile a global SAP template with the complex local requirements in this region."

Deployment of local China specialists

The initial task was to establish efficient template processes in the Wagner divisions Decorative Finishing and Industrial Solutions (with the individual Wagner business units DIY, Craftsman and Industry) based on the current processes at the central locations in Markdorf and Altstätten.

These were then coordinated with the business process owners across all divisions. The next step was to define the processes relevant for China.

SAP implementation in this country of 1.3 billion people is a special challenge. China has its own requirements for accounting (Chinese GAAP) and the necessary legal reporting.

A Golden Tax solution with an interface to the SAP ERP system must be available. Reports and documents to Chinese business partners must be available in the "simplified chinese language".

The linguistic and cultural differences between Europe and the Middle Kingdom are considerable. The use of local specialists is therefore helpful.

In defining the processes relevant to China, these questions were at the forefront:

• How to avoid problems during implementation that are due to local requirements?
• How can differences between the SAP standard and local legal and business needs be taken into account?

For this purpose, there was a special fit-gap workshop to compare the current processes and legal requirements as well as training for the Wagner key users. A particular difficulty here was that the training took place in the local language.

In the end, it was the task of the respective process owners to approve the defined business processes. There were several test cycles before the data was transferred to the new system by the local units on site.

The data migration from the legacy system, a non-SAP solution, was carried out using the Legacy System Migration Workbench (LSMW). cbs provided go-live and after-go-live support through local consultants.

Methodology M-cbs

The successfully proven M-cbs method was used for this complex project. The approach developed by cbs ensures consistent process and phase orientation and makes it possible to control a global rollout project and design it cost-efficiently.

In this case, the method facilitated the creation of the project plan, process lists, key user documentation, and open items list.

With M-cbs, the rollout project accelerated significantly. The new template was built within only four months. It includes the modules Sales and Distribution (SD), Materials Management (MM), Production Planning and Control (PP), Project System (PS), Warehouse Management (WM), Quality Management (QM), Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO).

The template functions like a modular system that contains a defined set of global business processes, process variants, and encapsulated processes successfully implemented in Europe for various business models.

Wagner now has an SAP template that is specifically tailored to the company's needs. It consists of a global template with SAP standards for processes, master data and reporting and special, company-wide Wagner definitions.

Standardized and proven processes

The Wagner company in Shanghai was able to work immediately on a functioning SAP ERP system from the first day of operation. Stefanie Stiefel, Director IT Applications:

"The rollout to China shows that it pays to work with a partner who has specific expertise in the target region."

Otherwise, there could have been subsequent expense in the commercialization phase after the rollout. This could be avoided.

Wagner has reached a first, important milestone.

"We can now handle the growing business in China much more effectively thanks to standardized and proven processes. The new, uniform SAP solution makes it possible to compare the key figures achieved in China worldwide."

Stefanie Stiefel explains.

Wagner has thus made good progress in its ambitious plan to work with just one SAP ERP system worldwide, with harmonized master data and standardized processes.

The company has also taken a step forward in terms of IT governance. In the future, IT will be easier to control. And IT processes can be aligned even more consistently with the corporate strategy.

However, China is only the start of the global rollout strategy. Wagner now has a solid basis for including other national companies in the SAP strategy.

The project will be continued along proven lines, with further template rollouts to follow. The next project at the Denver and Chicago sites in the USA has already been started.