Improving Governance and Performance in ERP Integration with SAP S/4HANA

Our customer is is an international food manufacturing company specialising in the manufacture and distribution of freshly prepared foods and supplying “own brand” products to major supermarket chains.

From humble beginnings the business grew rapidly, primarily through acquisitions. In 2023, revenue exceeded £2bn with 18,000 employees across ~40 factory sites across the UK, US and China.

Our customers acquisitive growth strategy had led to disparate systems and business processes across the company.

They initiated a new programme to align their UK operations onto best practice processes, supported by a new SAP S/4Hana ERP solution. The implementation of this requires integration with numerous retained IT platforms, encompassing replacement of ‘end-of-life’ middleware, and changes to retained applications, and not least, significant business change across their large, geographically dispersed workforce.

The experienced Project One team of six have achieved a step change in the performance of, and executive confidence in, the programme by addressing the following challenges:

1. Driving improvements in the governance, reporting and stakeholder control of the programme.

2. Driving up the performance of the “Tier 2” systems integrator previously appointed by the customer.

3. Taking control of the Detailed Design process, which was behind schedule and failing to meet quality objectives. Project One orchestrated the key design workshops and resources and drove adherence to clear quality standards for both workshop preparation and outputs.

4. Driving integrated planning across the 14 workstreams to ensure clarity on cross-workstream dependencies and to draw out the critical path towards System Integration Test.

5. Implementing a robust PMO to establish and run an efficient cadence of meetings and status reporting to bring the workstreams under a central command and control.

6. Challenging the steering group to re-assess the deployment strategy, and therefore the deployment scope, impacting on the integrated planning.

7. Providing new, experienced leadership into the data, reporting and retained IT systems workstreams.

The business (and end-customer) outcomes are yet to be delivered as we continue to work with our customer on the programme with deployment of the new systems and processes planned for H2 2025.

The interim benefits for our customer are:

• The uplifting of the programme in terms of quality and time objectives

• Improvements in the performance of the SI

• The increase in confidence in the programme, not just for internal stakeholders but also for the external auditors: “We did not find any points for improvement in the areas of our scope”

• A lower risk deployment approach, which will enable earlier realisation of business benefits by delivering efficiencies and improved effectiveness in back-office operations.

Project One value add:

Our customer urgently needed Project One’s help because their appointed SI was focusing solely on their accountability to design and configure the SAP S/4HANA software solution, and leaving the wider programme scope (data, reporting, middleware, retained estate, business change and deployment) with significant management gaps.

Project One were able to rapidly deploy an experienced team who could quickly understand the challenges and initiate root-and-branch improvement activities within days of landing.

The Project One team are working customer-side to keep suppliers honest and accountable, with only the customer’s agenda in mind.

Unlock the full potential of your business with our expert insights. Contact us today to discover how we can help you achieve your goals.

theteam@projectone.com