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From a management perspective, the logistical and financial questions arise again and again: At which location can a product be produced most cost-effectively? Where do I have the shortest transport routes? Does the initial cost and price calculation fit? These are precisely the questions that Schott also asked itself. The company, with a history of more than 135 years, is considered the inventor of specialty glass and achieves a turnover of 2.2 billion euros with 16,200 employees worldwide.

In the case of Schott, there are about 80 companies that have to be converted on a go-live date (big bang). There are 270 finance employees in the Group who need to be picked up as part of the change management process.

"We are breaking new ground with many aspects, especially with the new Margin Analysis result calculation and the parallel valuation via the Material Ledger, also on the topic of data migration. To our knowledge, no one has done this in this form before." says Oliver Böhm.

Schott's existing One Finance has uniform standards, processes, data bases and a uniform organizational structure based on the current SAP ERP/ECC system. With the help of S/4, this is now to be further developed. This will enable Schott to achieve comprehensive reporting more quickly: a global controlling area, a fiscal year variant, and a detailed specification of the functional areas.

Jens Schulte on this: "In summary, One Finance gives us the ability to make our system more granular, more concise, more flexible and faster to respond much better to market situations."

In principle, S/4 acts as a development plan, defining a whole series of guard rails that will shape the integrated system of the entire company over a period of 20 years or more.

"S/4 is a major investment that our group is making as we move forward"says Schulte. Therefore, the switch to S/4 alone as a technological upgrade (brownfield) would have been too little for Schott.

With S/4, Schott now forms the basis for faster monthly and annual financial statements. In addition, an optimized and individual reporting system.

Schulte explains: "Think of sales, where real-time credit limit assessment enables faster response to customer requests, or where faster quotation costing gives a significant competitive advantage through an immediate sales response. If we now move to the management level, Realtime Data Processing fulfills every CFO's dream of generating the complete group picture, right down to the balance sheet, at the touch of a button at any time."

Schott started with a proof of concept a year and a half ago. This will result in agile corporate management for the company, so that the focus can be shifted quickly even in times of crisis, for example from growth-oriented evaluations to strict cash and cost management. The reporting frequency will then be increased and the company's key KPIs will be available at weekly level so that the company can enter into dialog with the business units in a timely manner.

"We want to continue to drive digitization forward until 2025, and this applies both to the finance area and to the entire company. Finance was one of the first to look at new digitization options, such as analytics tools to create forecasts of monthly sales from daily peaks. We want to be the role model for the Group. We have well-prepared processes and we have people with an affinity for IT and processes who are very interested in working with digitization topics."adds Schulte.