Reducing Time, Risk and Costs with Global SAP S/4HANA Rollouts

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Global ERP rollouts are often the most challenging digital transformations undertaken by multinational companies. The need to implement a consistent system across countries and subsidiaries while adapting to local conditions can lead to lengthy, complex, and costly projects. Traditional approaches often suffer from delays, operational risks, and ballooning costs. However, new strategies that emphasize early system visibility, proactive change management, and parallelization are revolutionizing the way companies approach these rollouts—ultimately reducing the risks that accompany prolonged implementations.

We explore how companies are addressing the complexities of global rollouts by using these innovative approaches, based on insights from Toni Tomic, Senior Partner at Ernst & Young, and Bob Cummings, CEO of LeapGreat.

Global Rollouts: It’s not just a Copy and Paste

Global rollouts of SAP S/4HANA have far-reaching operational impacts. Companies seek to leverage S/4HANA’s power as a unified ERP system across subsidiaries while accommodating local requirements. Traditionally, these projects have started with creating a template based on the headquarters’ implementation and then copying and pasting for subsidiaries.  However, this copy-and-paste approach often leads to surprises, long project timelines and increased costs.  Unless a template is designed to be rolled out, copy and paste leads to many pitfalls.

From Toni Tomic’s experience: “A well-designed global template must account for both current subsidiaries and future acquisitions. By involving subsidiaries early in the design of the template, companies find better collaboration and shared learning across the organization”.

Furthermore, if subsidiaries can experience the live system with their own view and data, right at the beginning of the project, it allows for the parallelization of the rollout.  This is much better than the traditional approach of sequetial waves of implementations.

Early System Visibility: Cutting Time by Avoiding Late-Stage Surprises

One of the biggest breakthroughs in reducing the time to completion in global rollouts is early visibility of the working system for each subsidiary. Traditionally, companies only see their actual working system late in the project, which leads to significant adjustments when the system didn’t function as expected. These adjustments often caused delays, increased costs, and greater risks.

Bob Cummings highlighted the benefit of LeapGreat’s FrontLoad™ where each subsidiary can experience their working system before starting their rollout: “Early system visibility also enables companies to do all workshops with their working system, which accelerates feedback loops and enhances collaboration across teams”

Early visibility ensures that the global template works as intended across subsidiaries.  Project teams can make informed decisions and refine the system quickly, addressing any local discrepancies long before they escalate into larger issues that would slow down the project. This approach dramatically reduces the time to project completion, as it minimizes late-stage rework and helps ensure a smoother rollout.

Early visibility also reduces the cost associated with long discovery phases – spending far less time on theoretical planning and more on practical refinements.

Proactive Change Management: Reducing Resistance and Operational Delays

One of the most common causes of delay or even failure in global rollouts is ineffective change management.  In a traditional project, change management efforts often happen late in the project, resulting in resistance from users who are unprepared for the new system.

Bob emphasized that “Change management should begin from day one, facilitated by real-time system visibility. Stakeholders can see their processes and roles within the system early, leading to smoother adoption and fewer surprises later”.  

Toni added that “Clear, interactive documentation can help new users, especially younger team members, grasp the system quickly, thus mitigating one of the main causes of rollout delays.”

Parallelization: Scaling the Rollout Process

In traditional rollouts, the serial approach—where the system is first implemented at headquarters and then rolled out to subsidiaries in phases—leads to lengthy timelines. Subsidiaries may wait months or even years to start working on their system, which increases the risk of misalignment.

Toni expertly commented “There is the problem of sequencing the rollout implementations.    It is hard to parallelize this effort so that everyone is working together on the same page and providing refinements to the solution. If one can parallelize, you can dramatically shorten the rollout cycles.”

LeapGreat enables parallelization by employing its FrontLoad™ for each subsidiary based on a global template.  This parallelization reduces the overall time to completion and enhances collaboration between subsidiaries, as they can share insights and best practices during the process.

By preventing prolonged project timelines, companies can significantly cut down on the resources needed. Shorter projects also reduce the risk of unforeseen challenges that can arise during long engagements.

Key Takeaways

  • Early System Visibility lets organizations experience how the system will function across different regions at the start of any rollout, allowing for faster refinements and reducing the risk of late-stage rework.
  • Proactive Change Management helps address potential resistance from end users, speeding up adoption and preventing costly delays caused by poor communication or unprepared teams.
  • Parallelization of rollout efforts cuts down the time to completion, allowing companies to implement the system across multiple subsidiaries simultaneously, lowering the overall project cost and risk.

Bob Cummings summarized this perfectly: “Don’t underestimate Global Rollouts – they are not a simple cut and paste exercise.  There can be factors more challenging than a normal implementation.  There is a better way through FrontLoad™ of the Global Template early for each subsidiary or plant and parallelizing the rollout.  This reduces risk and increases the value that the customer gains on these projects.”

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