Reorganisation in record time

Anyone who travels by tram or bus in Bonn will be familiar with Stadtwerke Bonn. With the group company “SWB Bus und Bahn”, the municipal company has been taking care of local transport in the city and region for more than a century. The Group company Stadtwerke Bonn Dienstleistungs-GmbH (or “SWB Service” for short) is responsible for the maintenance and repair of more than 200 buses and around 100 trams.

In order to be able to cooperate even better and faster, the Group planned some time ago to merge the two Group companies into the acquiring company SWB Bus und Bahn. However, merging the two companies also meant reorganizing the commercial SAP systems: This affected the profit centers and cost centers as well as the entire document history of the systems. It was also necessary to transfer all business operations of SWB Service to SWB Bus und Bahn as part of the merger and to realign them within SWB Bus und Bahn.

A special challenge of this project was that only five months were available for the project, which was not very much time for a project of this complexity and scale. Therefore, the SAP experts at GAMBIT had to carry out the core tasks of consolidation and reorganization in parallel, not one after the other as is usually the case in “classically” managed projects. In addition, SWB Bus und Bahn wanted to be able to continue with operative business as quickly as possible on the day the new system was launched. 

The specific goal, therefore, was to ensure that the partially processed documents would be available in a consistent format for further processing. For GAMBIT, this requirement was, of course, further motivation to successfully implement the project to the letter. SWB Bus und Bahn established a project structure and provided expertise from key users and SAP experts in information technology to support the project’s implementation.

To avoid delays in the process and ultimately deliver the desired quality, the consultants had to thoroughly plan and coordinate the project from the outset and, above all, maintain ongoing communication with all departments of the group companies. GAMBIT provided SWB Bus und Bahn with comprehensive consulting services from the very beginning and kept them informed about the planning and design. In addition, it continuously ensured the quality of the work deliverables in order to identify potential problems early on. The consulting services covered, for example, every module used, such as the EC-CS consolidation module. Furthermore, the consulting services addressed, among other things, additional requirements for reporting.

The GAMBIT specialists worked with an SAP tool that had already proven itself on many occasions for cases such as this and that had already been used by the SAP experts to implement numerous projects: SAP Landscape Transformation 2.0 (SAP LT 2.0). This is a standardized tool that can be used to convert data objects in SAP architectures efficiently. In this project for SWB Bus und Bahn, the LT scenarios “company code merge”, “profit center merge”, and “cost center merge” were implemented in parallel. SAP LT 2.0 can also be adapted to customer requirements, for example, through additional implementations within the tool. The IT experts also used these, since the continuation of the SWB Service processes in the merger company was subject to special requirements that had to be mapped technically. The consultants used other tools as well: the data migration tool LSMW (Legacy System Migration Workbench) and special GAMBIT tools in the form of additional developments.

Throughout the entire duration of the project, implementations took place in parallel with test scenarios/efforts of the project participants at SWB Bus und Bahn, so that the quality was always directly checked and assured.

After five months, an outcome was achieved with which all participants were extremely satisfied. The SAP experts reached the goal set for the merger and reorganization, in close collaboration with the persons responsible and the project team at SWB Bus und Bahn. They kept to the budget and schedule, the go-live went smoothly, and the quality of the deliverables also met the client’s expectations.