Thriving IT landscapes

With 400 employees at two locations, Scheurich produces up to 100,000 articles a day - from planters for cactus and plantbags for kitchen herbs to XXL planters for fan palms - on highly automated production lines with robots, state-of-the-art firing units and coating systems.

Logistics with a fully integrated SAP system enables customers to be supplied "just in time".

"High flexibility and short delivery routes are quite crucial in the garden business".

explains Managing Director Reinhard Birven. But the SAP system at Scheurich was getting on in years.

"Many processes no longer corresponded to the current state of the art".

recalls IT Manager Jörg Chemii.

Scheurich therefore decided to introduce a new financial system with S/4 Hana Finance, which was based on the structures of the new general ledger. In a second step, the enterprise resource planning was then also to be migrated to S/4 Hana Enterprise Management.

Migration analysis creates clarity

Because S/4 Hana required the use of the Hana database, the project was initially preceded by a switch to Hana and Enhancement Package 7. This meant that Scheurich was already using SAP Business Suite on Hana before migrating to S/4 Hana.

The database change was followed by the alignment with the new functionalities in S/4 Hana.

"In the course of this migration analysis, both the technical framework of the IT systems will be adapted and the existing processes will be aligned with the new functions of S/4 Hana"

explains Michael Riedel, CTO at Innovabee.

The result: There were no changes in S/4 Hana that would have been incompatible with Scheurich's processes.

Transfer individual developments into S/4

The company was also able to continue using its proprietary developments.

"In general, of course, it makes sense to review your own processes as you implement S/4 Hana"

says project manager Frank Weinfurth.

"But from a technical point of view, there is nothing to stop individual developments being transferred one-to-one to the new system. As long as they are programmed cleanly to the standard, custom developments can be used without problems even after the migration."

Before the actual migration, however, a second migration analysis took place. In the meantime, S/4 Hana 1610 was available.

"All S/4 Hana Finance functions were thus included in the core of S/4 Hana Enterprise Management. For us, this was the reason to change our original roadmap and introduce S/4 Hana Enterprise Management in just one step."

says IT Manager Jörg Chemii.

Go-live after nine months

The second migration analysis was followed by the actual migration. For this purpose, a system copy of the old SAP system was set up, the necessary transports were imported, the customizing was implemented, the development was advanced and the custom code was adapted. Finally, the final conversion took place in the real system.

"During the course of the project, we performed three test migrations with the appropriate walkthroughs and subsequent testing by the consultants and key users"

explains Frank Weinfurth.

"This allowed us to analyze and fix almost all problems in advance."

Since the live start a few weeks ago, the processes at Scheurich have been running smoothly and according to plan.

"The smooth go-live is thanks to the dedication of the entire project team"

explains Reinhard Birven.

"We know from experience that it is immense, intensive and exhausting work to implement such a project in such a short time.

We are all the more pleased that we have now created the basis to be able to start in the future - with the successive introduction of the Fiori technology - and thereby take advantage of the performance gain and the planned functional enhancements of S/4 Hana live."