Plant reassignment for company code merge

The complex merge included the transfer of all logistics and CO objects, including their history; in the case of the objects from Financial Accounting, only the open documents, balances and assets were affected.

Since the system transformation took place during ongoing operations, the downtime of the SAP system was limited to a maximum of 30 hours. This time limit was met by a minimally invasive procedure with the special software cbs ET.

Because ArcelorMittal also maps all its corporate processes in the SAP system, from logistics to production control to finance, it is important for those responsible to keep their complex IT landscape up to date at all times.

With the merger of the two company codes at the Duisburg plants in Hochfeld and Ruhrort, the external appearance has been standardized. This is also reflected in all forms. Internally, administrative processes have been streamlined and synergies achieved, for example in purchasing.

For this organizational restructuring, an integration of two previously independently accounting parts of the company into one unit took place. In the future, this unit will use only one SAP system ERP/ECC 6.0 with APO and BW.

Specifically, the smaller company code was dissolved and the associated data of all logistics and CO objects, including their history, was transferred. Only in financial accounting was the transfer of open documents, balances and assets sufficient. The basic organization and all processes of the plants remained unchanged.

Comprehensive merging projects are hardly possible without disrupting operations - certainly not in the context of 24/7 production as at ArcelorMittal. However, interrupting production results in enormous costs.

Therefore, the project specification was to merge the two company codes in the SAP financial module during ongoing production and to limit the downtime of the SAP system to a maximum of 30 hours.

Within this narrow time window, production can continue independently of the SAP system with appropriate planning. All information that is normally delivered to the SAP system during the production process is stored in a buffer in the interface and can be automatically processed at a later date.

The challenge was to complete the merge within this 30-hour downtime. In the process, around one million open items and all previous processes were transferred unchanged.

To stay on schedule with this System Landscape transformation, the project team migrated the historical objects in advance and indexed the remaining data sets so that they were transferred in the optimal order.

In order to be able to address all SAP EEC modules and post around one million open items within the planned time window, the project team prepared meticulously.

It started with an analysis of all processes, system and data structures in the two parts of the company and outlined the planning based on this. In subsequent workshops, users from the logistics and finance departments defined the scope of the project and defined specific selection criteria for each individual object. Based on the results of the user acceptance test, the data quality was successively increased.

The cbs team carried out the technical migration over a weekend using the Enterprise Transformer migration software. Thanks to the minimally invasive procedure with this tool, the downtime of the affected systems at go-live was reduced to 24 hours.

During this time, the current data was migrated. The transfer of all objects from the history had already taken place before. To speed up the export and import process, computing power was increased and all tables were linked with indexes to quickly find and assign data. These measures reduced the time needed for export by 80 percent.

On Monday morning, it became apparent that the careful planning as well as the trusting cooperation between the consulting team and the users had paid off: ArcelorMittal employees had access to all data and did not notice that they were now working in a different company code.

"cbs has proven its expertise as a technical leader for demanding data transformations and has been a reliable partner. This professional support has brought us a decisive step forward."

sums up SAP team leader Arkadius Fischer.