Some weekends are simply unforgettable. For more than 250 members of the project team at SPAR Austria – made up of their user departments, their IT and GAMBIT – it was a weekend at the end of April 2023 that will stay in their memories forever: the weekend of the successful SAP S/4HANA go-live for finance and controlling.
After months of preparation, countless tests and more than 100 live training events and courses – not to mention constant information sharing within the team and with the SAP partner GAMBIT – May 1, 2023 was the day on which the SPAR Austria Group‘s new SAP S/4HANA system went into operation in seven countries. After a virtually seamless cutover weekend, thousands of SAP users started using the new Fiori apps for the first time on this date.
The corporate group from Austria was perfectly prepared for the changeover. It all started back in 2020, when SPAR Austria and GAMBIT completed a joint preliminary project for SAP S/4HANA to help them find the best migration path to SAP S/4HANA and draft a detailed plan for the transition.
The company‘s goal was clear from the start. SPAR wanted to use SAP S/4HANA to build a digital and therefore future-proof new ERP system that would make the company fit for the future, optimise processes, and reduce complexity. The SAP S/4HANA implementation project kicked off in September 2021.
Replacement of SAP ECC with a Greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA
“The project involved replacing the existing finance and controlling system with an SAP S/4HANA system implemented using a Greenfield approach,” explains Philipp Fischer, project lead and project manager at GAMBIT Consulting. Despite the complexity of the value flows and the size of the company, a “big bang” scenario was chosen for the implementation of SAP S/4HANA for the finance and controlling area, including group accounting with consolidation and intercompany reconciliation and payment services with centralised payment.
The scope of the project was enormous. A total of 360 company codes distributed across seven countries were migrated in the course of the implementation. The ACDOCA table (the finance and controlling table in SAP S/4HANA) contained more than 800 million entries at go-live – a gigantic amount of data. The fact that this project was a success was not only due to the technical migration but above all to change management and the outstanding multidisciplinary collaboration between the user departments, SPAR ICS (SPAR Austria’s IT unit) and GAMBIT.
“In particular, our IT unit and the international finance department at SPAR Austria acted as an internal team. And the collaboration continues: We are now working continuously and collaboratively to optimise the processes in the company,” explains Veronika Mayer, Head of the Competence and Service Center Accounting/Controlling at SPAR Austria.
“I can certainly confirm that,” said Gerhard Belina, IT Project Management at SPAR ICS, SPAR Austria’s IT unit. “We had a truly fantastic project team with colleagues who were highly committed and greatly contributed to our success – whether from the business side or the IT side at SPAR, or from our partner GAMBIT. And let’s not forget: the extremely high level of commitment from our management was also one of the factors that gave us a great deal of encouragement and made this success possible.”
The reward for all the effort put into the project is a modern and future-proof new SAP S/4HANA system, faster and better business processes, a state-of-the-art deviceindependent user interface, and – last but not least – the “Grand Winner” prize in the Business Transformation category of the 2023 SAP Quality Awards in Austria.
According to SAP, the winning companies “have best implemented the ten required principles of quality management and show how digital business processes can be used to achieve greater e¤ciency, more flexibility, and cost savings.”
