S/4HANA: A Strategic Journey from ECC

Established in 2016, pladis Global is a biscuit, chocolate and confectionery company that comprises longstanding, pedigree brands including McVities, Godiva Chocolatier (Belgium), Flipz and Turtles in the USA and Ülker (Turkey). The organisation boasts annual revenues over $5.2bn and operates in over 130 countries. As a young organisation with over 26,000 employees and 34 manufacturing plants and distribution centres spread across the globe, pladis made the strategic decision in 2017 to drive a new consumer-centric operating model, streamline operations and enable profitable growth by implementing a new digital technology platform.

To realise this vision, pladis has embarked on a Digital Transformation journey to create new business capabilities, relevant to the digital world, including being more agile with customers and consumers and adapt quickly to changing market and consumer needs and preferences. The first step on the journey was S/4HANA Cloud – SAP’s Digital Core. Keytree was selected as the SAP partner of choice to handle the implementation and rollout, following in-depth discussions and explorations from both parties as to define the organisational and project objectives. The pladis team were eager to maximise Keytree’s extensive knowledge of the digital landscape and strong innovation credentials.

The project had an aggressive timeline, delivering the solution to the North American business in 22 weeks. The project team was split between London, New York and Pennsylvania and delivery followed the ‘SAP Activate’ methodology, aligned with Keytree’s method and delivery toolkit. pladis now operates with vastly improved business processes in North America that have delivered faster month-end close, including 3-way matching, workflow approvals and a clearer view of debtors – providing timely and accurate business reporting, enforcing better business practices and ensuring accurate financial and operational management. Warehouse management has more functionality than ever before, due to the Keytree WMS app. The main business benefits are end-to-end visibility and integration as well as automation of processes; elimination of non-value adding tasks while standardising processes across the company.

Keytree has delivered a solution which is easily scalable to support the organisation’s ambitions to grow within both existing and emerging markets. Roll-out to future regions is underway in Asia Pacific with Australia and China top of the list – delivered by the core Keytree delivery team and Keytree APJ and China.

As a leading UK and US transport company, with annual revenue in excess of £5bn and 110,000 employees, First Group was looking to modernise its UK based finance and procurement processes. They chose SAP S/4HANA on Enterprise Cloud to provide a state-of-the-art user experience, best practice processes and to reduce infrastructure overheads. Keytree was chosen as the delivery partner following an extensive bidding process based on its SAP S/4HANA expertise, particularly in finance and around the company’s reputation in the technology and innovation space. Keytree successfully delivered the solution in 2018.

Delivery followed the ‘SAP Activate’ methodology, and Keytree adopted SAP Best Practice, an approach based on mapping First Group’s business processes to SAP Best Practice process models. Keytree delivered a system where the physical kit and infrastructure is all hosted in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and was configured via SAP Best Practice ‘Building Blocks’.

S/4HANA is digitally transforming a range of business processes that previously were very labour intensive and providing First Group with a platform that can grow with the business.

First Group no longer needs to undertake manual cross-system reconciliation activities or manually process its large number of distinct payrolls. Bank statements has been enhanced and simplified through the use of SAP standard workflows.

By moving all business processes for finance and procurement to S/4HANA, both parts of the business are now deployed within a single system as opposed to two separate systems, which also allows for a more simplified and faster period close process. Off-system procedures are a thing of the past. Intercompany approvals and invoicing were conducted via email and featured copying data from Excel into the legacy finance system, but this is now all contained in S/4HANA.

The SAP S/4HANA implementation has given First Group’s Bus and Group Finance operations in the UK a wealth of business benefits including far quicker period-close processes while replacing the legacy, function-key based ERP solution with a consumer-grade user experience.