Gold for the world champion
Forward-looking SAP S/4HANA migration
The DSAG Business Report 2018 shows that one in three companies is planning to migrate from ERP 6.X to S/4HANA in the next three years. More than 1,000 customers already successfully migrated to the new system in 2017. As a result, many long-standing SAP users are faced with the question of when is the best time to migrate to the next evolutionary stage of the SAP ERP system. This was also the case for Scheurich.
While the previous SAP S/4HANA releases had a strong focus on finance, the 1610 release offered the opportunity to fully utilise the benefits of S/4HANA for the first time, particularly in the sales and logistics processes that are important to Scheurich. In general, the process flows of the frontrunners in the consumer goods industry are characterised by a high degree of digitalisation. The future market leaders will be those who optimally meet today's digitalisation requirements and quickly take advantage of emerging opportunities.
One example is the topic of electronic data interchange (EDI): Stable, high-performance process scenarios play a fundamental role in the exchange relationships with market-leading retail and DIY chains. Reinhard Birven, Managing Director of Scheurich, explains: "For the future of all digital business processes, it is not only the powerful core of S/4HANA and the associated opportunities that are crucial to success.
In order to master this technological realignment with confidence, it was important for us to have a partner at our side who not only knows about the pitfalls of migrating to S/4HANA, but who can also assess and avoid possible effects on our integration scenarios, such as our web shop and our SEEBURGER middleware." In this respect, a project like this could only be successfully realised if the implementation partner could reliably combine in-depth SAP expertise with in-depth knowledge of the requirements of our retail and logistics partners.
In this respect, Scheurich attached great importance to being able to obtain analysis, design and realisation from a single source for both SAP and SEEBURGER. Birven continues:
Jörg Chemii, Head of IT & Organisation Scheurich GmbH & Co. KG
The implementation strategy for the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management System
Expertise instead of experiments
The manufacturer-specific needs of Scheurich were addressed with CONCETO's reliable process consulting. For example, it was important to Scheurich that S/4HANA was operated in the customer's own network. On the other hand, it was ensured that various connections to subsystems were created and that all options for customised extensions could still be used.
Jörg Chemii, Head of IT at Scheurichs, emphasises: "We were able to benefit from the cross-system expertise right from the start. This was the guarantee for reliably bringing such an important project to go-live." Key milestones resulted from the Maintenance Planner. Customer vendor integration (CVI) and custom code checks were important cornerstones. Various customer-specific programmes had to be adapted using a simplification list.
At the same time, this provided the opportunity to analyse the customer's own applications that had been developed over the years and check whether they could be replaced by standard functionalities or had become obsolete. The project was therefore completed in less than a year and went live in August 2017.
Christian Groner, Project Manager SD and EDI (Scheurich), emphasises that "such an innovative project as the introduction of the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management System was only possible thanks to the carefully selected partnership. Now we can guarantee flawless manufacturing and logistics processes with our optimised IT processes and meet the increasing demand from our customers.
