SAPinsider Issue 3 2020

has improved (Vodafone plans to measure this in the second half of -2020), but Grewe says that so far, change management has not been a challenge due to the improved user experience of SAP S/4HANA and moving activities to cloud offerings from SAP, such as SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Ariba solutions. Because increased automation results in lower error rates and higher efficiency, Vodafone’s auto- mation metric was particularly important for the company’s finance and IT operations processes. When comparing its target against baseline, it found that following the SAP S/4HANA migration, its automation rate increased significantly. Another metric that helped Vodafone measure its progress was the amount of standardization it achieved. Vodafone’s SAP ECC instance included many customizations, which eventually resulted in a slow system, a cumbersome process to imple- ment updates and enhancement packages, and a lot of regression testing. “It was important that we have more standardization in the next level to make everybody’s lives easier and the performance of the system better,” says Grewe. Vodafone increased standardization using the new system and was able to retire older custom code because the function- ality it addressed was now standard delivered with the new system. Vodafone now has nearly 12,000 professional users between its finance and supply chain manage- ment departments, and it has approximately 93,000 employees who are now using SAP Fiori launchpad for Vodafone’s SAP S/4HANA instance. Part of what makes Vodafone’s most recent transformation so impressive is not only its ability to convert its single-instance SAP ECC system into one of the five largest SAP S/4HANA instances in the world in such a short period of time, but also its success in implementing multiple other SAP solu- tions in parallel with the SAP S/4HANA migration — including cloud offerings such as SAP Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and SAP Fieldglass solutions — and integrating those solutions with SAP S/4HANA. Successful Integration Puts Vodafone Ahead of the Curve Vodafone wanted to take full advantage of the innovation and reporting capabilities across these SAP platforms, which required integrating these solutions with SAP S/4HANA. Some of the solutions that the business was implementing in parallel with SAP S/4HANA were so new that standard integra- tions were still under development, which added complexity to the analysis and design phase of the project, according to Grewe. For example, standard integrations did not yet exist for creating a single inbox where managers could view their work list or outstanding approvals, rather than having to check five different solutions for the information. “Each solution contains different data models, and we needed a common denominator to ensure we could mix and match the data to produce mean- ingful information,” Grewe says. “To enable this, you need to have the right architecture and the right products, and SAP assured us it was working diligently on its side to create the new standard integrations. SAP kept us up to date on those devel- opments to ensure our integrations followed the future architecture that SAP is now creating, so we wouldn’t need to rebuild everything after go-live.” Because Vodafone was replacing only parts of its existing functionality with each of the cloud solu- tions from SAP (as opposed to replacing the core system, as was the case with SAP S/4HANA), it did not have to go live all at once. Each project rollout took a slightly different approach, with Vodafone’s finance function, led by Grewe, responsible for run- ning SAP Concur and SAP Fieldglass; its HR func- tion responsible for running SAP SuccessFactors; and its supply chain function responsible for run- ning SAP Ariba. SAP Concur replaced functionality that Voda- fone previously had in two different systems. In the old environment, travel booking was done through a third-party system and expense management was handled in a core SAP system. The company replaced this functionality with SAP Concur coun- try by country over a nine-month period. “The last piece went live two months after the last piece of the core SAP S/4HANA system went live, and it proved to be a very good implementation strat- egy. SAP Concur as a product is quite mature. We started to deploy it in two markets as a pilot, and we then increased the number of markets for release every quarter,” says Grewe. Vodafone’s HR organization took a different approach to replacing its core system with SAP SuccessFactors by implementing a mix between a country-by-country rollout approach and a central SAPinsiderOnline.com 5