Vodafone builds excellent mission on SAP S/4 Hana

Holger Grewe, group head of company transformation, and Ignacio Garcia, CIO company programs, at Vodafone, bring how SAP S/4 Hana has been purposely implemented as section of an ongoing excellent mission transformation

Brian McKenna

Brian McKenna,
Trade Purposes Editor

Published: 19 Aug 2020 12: 38

Vodafone’s SAP property, in accordance with an S/4 Hana mission resource planning (ERP) machine, has change into a keystone of the telecoms firm’s transformation into a excellent mission, in step with two of its company industry technology leaders.

Holger Grewe, group head of company transformation, and Ignacio Garcia, CIO of company programs, at Vodafone, depict the telecommunications provider’s relationship with SAP as strategic in nature, now not merely a provider-buyer one.

Working with SAP and Accenture, Vodafone has established a single digital core in accordance with the ERP machine SAP S/4 Hana in a style that can also like leapt off a convention stir deck. The implementation’s aim was as soon as to reinforce operational efficiency in industry capabilities a lot like finance, provide chain and IT, and it was as soon as accomplished in a big-bang roll-out across 26 countries, for 130 plus appropriate entities.

The machine walk-live was as soon as on the discontinuance of November 2019. The mission took 18 months, inviting Vodafone’s single-occasion SAP Enterprise Core Substances (ECC) machine to change into one of the crucial five largest SAP S/4 Hana cases worldwide, with a truly powerful option of mounted assets in any single-occasion SAP machine globally.

The mission also incorporated world roll-outs of SAP’s peripheral machine-as-a-service products Concur, SuccessFactors and Ariba.

Grewe’s remit at Vodafone contains knowledge governance across all capabilities and all areas, moreover as atmosphere up and running SAP S/4 Hana for finance, provide chain and human resources (HR), SAP Concur shuffle reserving and charges, and logistics with enhanced warehouse management. He also has a spotlight on mergers and acquisitions integration and separation at a firm that has a fancy history of fusions and splits.

The digital transformation of the strengthen capabilities, utilizing SAP technology, at Vodafone started support in 2007, says Grewe. Right here, “strengthen capabilities” approach HR, provide chain and finance.

“What’s particular at Vodafone is that we were in a position to love a core of normal processes across all our companies”

Holger Grewe, Vodafone

“We checked out it from the standpoint that Vodafone acquires, integrates and moreover divests companies,” he says. “In the heyday of our mergers and acquisitions, we added a form of companies that had grown on their very possess and build their very possess processes, programs and so on in the background. The foremost to the transformational agenda at that time was as soon as to salvage Vodafone working in the same manner, wherever we were running.”

Vodafone is an extended-standing SAP buyer, but that is now not so particular, says Grewe. “What’s particular at Vodafone is that we were in a position to love a core of normal processes across all our companies. There are others with a total lot diversified SAP programs, but they lope very diversified processes in every of these programs, whereas our aim was as soon as no doubt for the processes that we selected, that we arrived at a standardised model,” he says.

And now, with the implementation of S/4 Hana, the firm has been introduced to a brand fresh level, he says.

“The principle step was as soon as no doubt pretty cumbersome, because going from market to market to develop this takes pretty some time. The principle step took us four to 5 years. The S/4 step is about optimising the processes and moreover optimising the actual person skills,” says Grewe.

“It is mainly delicate to express in the ragged [SAP] ECC world, we had this one, single-occasion machine, and it was as soon as very complex to salvage the guidelines out of the machine and develop the right evaluation. With S/4 now, we are no doubt in a position to salvage the guidelines and insight out unparalleled less complicated.”

The recordsdata windfall from Hana

Ignacio Garcia, as CIO, backs his colleague up on this point about higher insight being discoverable from S/4 than from ECC.

“We didn’t like the computing energy earlier than. In our industry, we now like a total bunch of hundreds of towers, and each tower has hundreds of parts. The recordsdata from all of those assets was as soon as too noteworthy to be analysed earlier than. Now, with Hana, we can like evaluation and develop predictive on that form of knowledge,” he says.

“That is one example of the profit, but there are extra. There could be also the combination with exterior knowledge sources and IoT [internet of things] knowledge. Previously, that was as soon as complex and never genuine time, and now we are reaching that. And that’s opening our machine as a lot as a extremely plump digital skills.”

The S/4 implementation is on-premise. “Sooner or later, we can walk to the cloud,” says Garcia. “We’re now getting the profit of a commoditisation of the [in-house] datacentre route. Now, things are inviting, the technology is evolving, the gigantic providers are now getting licensed and in the sizes that we now like, and at closing we can pass to the cloud.”

“We now like managed to optimise our possess operations and be far extra efficient. We now like killed the total legacy and the extra complexity that we had in the landscape”

Ignacio Garcia, Vodafone

For the time being, alternatively, “SAP also has two hearts”, cautions Grewe.

“One is the pass to machine as a service, and the second is that there are very elegant clients on-premise, particularly on the S/4 side, because SaaS gained’t ever cater for the total requirements of a elegant company organisation. They must fabricate a compromise on wobble of development for these two pathways that they soundless must strengthen,” he says.

“And for us, useless to claim, as one of the crucial finest S/4 Hana installations in the realm, we are looking out out for to be definite that that the on-premise side receives the needed attention by manner of integration and out of the box capabilities.”

His colleague Garcia says the implementation has radically simplified Vodafone’s mission machine landscape. “We now like managed to optimise our possess operations and be far extra efficient. We now like killed the total legacy and the extra complexity that we had in the landscape. So, I’d deliver sure, the energy of Hana is indispensable, now not correct for computing but equally for integration.

“Our machine integrates with the total local markets. We now like extra than 1,000 interfaces with diversified programs. We now like knowledge flowing across the firm. And right here’s on the center of our finance feature and the total lot. But that simplicity and integration is also key since the integrity of the guidelines and the truth there could be now not any breaking down is what enables us to be extra digital.”

Garcia concludes, invoking a Bill Gates trope from the 1990s, that the “mission of the future ought to be like the human body, getting knowledge from the senses, processing great-expeditiously in the brain, and sending an instruction straight to the body”.

“That’s what we are attempting to develop, taking away bottlenecks the place you’d like handbook processing,” he says. “That is the analogy for us, the place knowledge correct flows. It is now not a brand fresh theory, but now we now like the computing energy to plot shut it. We are in a position to homicide handbook processes in every single express.”

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