SAP Transformation Center

The dominant theme of the decade among SAP users is certainly the migration to SAP S/4HANA. The end of support for the SAP ECC version in 2027 is a cut-off date. For more than 40,000 companies that simply have to make the change – as long as they want to keep a smoothly running transaction system – this project can prove to be quite a challenge. Not because of its level of difficulty – consulting firms have already gathered a lot of experience in this area, good practices have been developed, and tools are available to automate and support the project at every stage. The risk associated with the conversion is lower than when the S/4 was launched on the market.

The problem may be an access to competences, as the number of companies ready to start a project is rapidly growing unlike the number of SAP module consultants and IT/SAP specialists.

Migrations to S/4 are just the tip of the iceberg. Business and technology transformation projects are a constant element in the life cycle of companies. Merging companies and their systems, carving out a system from a corporate template for a selected company prior to its sale, consolidations, standardizing a chart of accounts, creating a shared service center for a corporate group and data harmonization, and in recent years, migrations to cloud services. Each of these undertakings is fraught with risk, takes a long time, disorganizes day-to-day work to some degree, and requires shutting down the system, often for the amount of time unacceptable for business.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The ability to efficiently and quickly react to changes in the competitive business landscape is a key competence in today’s global economy – a premise on which our strategy is based in the approach to projects of transforming enterprises using SAP systems. Our goal is to implement such projects much faster, with minimal involvement of the customer’s employees and near zero downtime.

Our SAP Transformation Center was established in 2018 as a response to the growing demand for consultants specializing in transformation projects in SAP systems. It is a competence center that brings together mainly SAP module consultants, often with prior business experience and as key users of the systems in large companies, as well as SAP integration and technology specialists and developers, including ABAP experts. It has now grown to more than 50 people, divided into several teams.

Unlike the consulting department, where teams group specialists in specific business areas and system modules, STC consultants are divided into teams assigned to the locations of our offices:
Poznań (two teams), Warsaw, Cracow and Gdańsk (Tricity). The department is growing rapidly – the Tricity team has been operating for a short time, and in the spring of this year we opened a new office in Gdańsk mainly for that team. Anyway, recruitment for STC is open all the time.

High competence and many years of experience are confirmed by numerous SAP certificates. All for One Poland’s consultants (from STC and other departments of the company) have several hundred certificates confirming their expertise in SAP S/4HANA.

As Krzysztof Siwiec, Director of STC, emphasizes: “Our consultants participate in a few dozen projects simultaneously, working both for the Polish company All for One Poland, for the All for One group, and for the SNP group. They implement international projects often in multinational teams. As a result of completing tasks of varying complexity, for different clients in different industries, their competence is comprehensive and the experience they accumulate is diverse.”

Plans for this year include the implementation of about 100 projects, the majority of which (ca. 85%) are migrations to S/4 in international groups. For the All for One Group, we are implementing a program of migration to S/4 HANA, with at least one go-live each month.

The All for One SAP Transformation Center is the only competence center of its kind in the All for One Group. However, our potential in implementing transformation projects is not only STC. The Consulting Department, supported by SAP technology specialists, is an important part of transformation projects and carries out migrations in Greenfield and Brownfield models, as well as in the transformation approach. In the latter scenario, we implement projects using the CrystalBridge platform (Bluefield model), as well as the SAP Business Transformation Center (SAP calls this approach Selective Data Transition).

Initially, STC’s main tasks focused on carrying out work for SNP Group clients, using the CrystalBridge, data transformation platform. Currently, after ownership changes, our key partner is All for One – the largest SAP partner in the German-speaking area, with a base of more than 2,500 customers, a significant number of whom are planning or already implementing migrations to S/4. We also serve customers acquired directly by All for One Poland.

We are also a SAP partner in the use of SAP Business Transformation Center tools prepared for the implementation of transformation projects in the Lean Selective Data Transition approach.

We work for a variety of business partners: most are German companies, however there are also global corporate groups. Projects are carried out for companies in various countries in Europe as well as in Asia and both Americas. One of the largest projects in which STC consultants participated involved more than 30 countries.

The vast majority of the work is carried out remotely, making it possible to carry out tasks for multiple units in parallel. This significantly speeds up the whole process and allows it to be better organized and controlled. The customer does not incur additional costs related to logistics, and consultants do not waste time traveling.

Over the next few years, migrations to S/4 will make up the majority of STC projects. Let’s list some of the most interesting projects completed with participation of STC consultants. We were involved in a migration to S/4 with simultaneous implementation of initial optimization projects in a business planning environment and the Internet of Things for one of the largest international suppliers for the automotive industry in the field of steel forging and further processing.

For a global leader producing soil, asphalt and trash compaction equipment, as well as stabilizers and recyclers, we carried out a project in which, in addition to migration to S/4, a new optimized global financial reporting model was implemented in all branches worldwide.

Another project – for a manufacturer of refractory materials for the construction industry – was a classic migration for several companies, which additionally included the reorganization of organizational structures and corresponding processes.

In addition to migrations to S/4, the most common types of projects are carve-outs, i.e. system separations for selected business units, as well as system mergers and harmonizations. The most interesting projects of this type include harmonizations, in which data is changed in the SAP system to meet business requirements that change over time. This applies to both master data and transactional data. We can also change the history in the SAP system!

It is said that the biggest risk associated with SAP projects today is a limited access to competences, which simply means a shortage of consultants in the market. That’s why our approach to transformation places great emphasis on the use of tools that support and automate the various stages of the project, including data cleansing and migration. Such tools include SAP Landscape Transformation and the CrystalBridge platform.

The CrystalBridge data transformation platform, produced by SNP – a global leader in SAP transformation solutions, is a rich portfolio of transformation tools that automate multiple project stages according to various scenarios, such as migration to SAP S/4HANA, business unit merge, system architecture upgrade, harmonization (e.g. of a chart of accounts, master data when converting to a business partner, to a new general ledger), move (switching to, e.g., another database or operating system, migration to the cloud), business unit carve-out, test data management, as well as assessment and interface management.

Using these tools, we execute projects quickly and safely, maintaining control over their progress at every stage.

Automation allows us to minimize manual workload, for example, in the analysis phase of the project scope, when checking data consistency or conducting application-level tests. System downtime time is dramatically reduced (near-zero downtime). It is also possible – and safe – to run several projects in parallel, ending with a joint go-live.

SAP Business Transformation Center provides a limited set of possible selections and transformations, but does not increase the project effort compared to the Brownfield approach and is free of charge for SAP customers (requires SAP CALM, which is included in SAP Cloud Service subscriptions and in SAP Enterprise Support).