SAPinsider Issue 3 2020

of its shared services for finance, the supply chain, and human resources (HR), all supported by a core business model in a single instance of SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC). More than a decade later, in 2017, when the question arose about who the company should partner with to enter the next digital era, for Vodafone, the obvi- ous choice was to continue its relationship with SAP by migrating to SAP S/4HANA. “We wanted to create key insights for our finance department and business users in each department. In the old system, this process was quite cumber- some, but with the new SAP Fiori user experience and new SAP Fiori-based analytical apps available in SAP S/4HANA, we knew with certainty that SAP’s latest ERP upgrade was the right way to go,” says Holger Grewe, Head of Corporate Trans- formation at Vodafone. Vodafone also partnered with Accenture as its system integrator for the SAP S/4HANA migration. Building a Benefits-Driven Business Case Grewe says the real challenge with building the business case was aligning middle management behind agreed upon, measurable key performance indicators (KPIs), including a Net Promoter Score for employees, an automation rate, and a standard- ization rate. To do this, the organization needed to define business and IT transformation goals up front. “Clarity on drivers and a commitment from the project team to move this from A to B was key for all business stakeholders to buy in to the program,” says Grewe. When it first implemented its initial SAP ECC system in 2006, Vodafone established a single version of the truth in the system, but over time encountered challenges as demands arose for real- time data and analytics capabilities. “Getting to the information in the single-instance ERP system was far too cumbersome,” says Grewe. “A lot of data was copied out of the system and further used and manipulated before people could look at the infor- mation.” This meant the system could not be relied on or consulted for simple and essential business tasks such as reviewing cost centers and comparing them to the financial plan, according to Grewe. Determined to get results that would allow users to analyze real-time data in a flexible way with the new SAP Fiori apps available with SAP S/4HANA, and gain reliable and strategic insights, Vodafone moved forward with a strong business case and high expectations for the implementation. Going Live on One of the Largest SAP S/4HANA Instances in the World —in Just 18 Months To keep up with changes in the telecommunica- tions industry, Vodafone knew it needed to fully integrate automation and intelligence into its end-to-end business process to achieve operational efficiency and real-time capabilities. The business transformed its single instance of SAP ECC in a two-step execution across 22 countries and more than 100 legal entities. The first step of the journey was to change the database from Oracle to SAP HANA. The data migration was completed in November 2018. The second step was to convert the application layer from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA with SAP Fiori- based apps to address the needs defined in the busi- ness case created for the migration. The go-live of SAP S/4HANA was completed in November 2019, one year after the database migration, and three months of stabilization followed. Accenture provided technical support during each step of the project, and it guided Vodafone’s internal IT colleagues in facilitating testing and workshops around the functionality using a tradi- tional waterfall approach. SAP also played an inte- gral role in the project by providing skilled support for building the best-in-class solution. “That makes it sound easy, but it wasn’t — considering we’re talking about a single-instance solution utilized by more than 22 countries,” says Grewe. Despite the daunting size of the project, Vodafone migrated one of the largest single SAP instances in the world to SAP S/4HANA in only 18 months with minimal business disruption. To measure the success of the program, the com- pany relied heavily on the KPIs it developed during the business case stage, and compared the progress of these metrics (which measured employee expe- rience, automation, and standardization) against their pre-SAP S/4HANA baseline. Vodafone used a traditional Net Promoter Score as a metric for evaluating the employee experience on the old system. As of the publication of this article, it is too soon to tell whether the experience 4 SAPinsiderOnline.com