Post, SAP and GTW

An optimal combination of existing customer, partner and SAP itself gets BRIM going

SAP provides the solution architecture, GTW is on board as an implementation partner with more than 20 years of expertise in the area of BRIM, and IT at Swiss Post contributes the expertise around the specialist processes, always in close coordination with the specialist departments. The implementation work in BRIM is carried out by a 15-person team consisting of IT Swiss Post as well as GTW and SAP resources.

At the start of the project, a small Core BRIM team consisting of SAP and GTW Solution architects Kirsten Hussung and Christoph Granig, as well as Swiss Post's subject matter experts, was busy with planning and preparatory work to ensure that the switch to the new billing system was based on a generic and solid approach from the very beginning. "We had a lot of proof of concepts, a lot of analysis work in that initial phase." Kirsten Hussung, Chief Business Process Consultant SAP, looks back. "At the time, we had a BRIM Model Company installed on S/4 Hana in the cloud, which has since been delivered as standard service content."

The cloud environment offered the opportunity to quickly build prototypes for a wide range of areas in order to discuss the results with those involved in the project at Swiss Post. In 2019, the BRIM project really took off, after the project had been put on hold again in the meantime. The project team at Swiss Post took another detailed look at BRIM when the first PoCs from the BRIM Model Company were available. "Until 2018, the opinion was that everything could continue to be billed in SD in the future. Together with SAP, we have done a lot of convincing".Christoph Granig, Manager and Principal Solution Architect at GTW Switzerland, explains.

"The BRIM decision actually came after the S/4 project was already up and running. The fact that we were now switching to a new invoicing system in parallel has once again increased the complexity of the S/4 project." describes Philipp Muri. "Here, I recommend making the decision as early as possible so that the entire internal IT team as well as external consultants are well prepared and not possibly overloaded." At that time, more than a hundred internal employees and consultants were involved in the S/4 conversion: in addition to the team from GTW and SAP, four other large consulting firms were also involved. In the many sub-projects, around 15 smaller consulting firms were also involved. "At project peaks, over a hundred employees had to be coordinated by program management and subproject managers to really get everyone pulling in the same direction"says Markus Hägele. "With such a mammoth project, no one can use any mavericks." And Christoph Granig from GTW adds: "There was a real hands-on mentality throughout the program; there was always immediate action and mutual support, regardless of which consulting house you belonged to."

Standard without old habits

IT started a selection process via Purchasing to find BRIM resources on the European market with the relevant expertise and the necessary references in the transport and logistics sector. The consulting partner for the extensive project should cover as much as possible. "What use are consultants who only know FI-CA but lack the know-how about the entire offer-to-cash process? We needed a project partner who not only knew about the adjacent financial modules in SAP, but also about all BRIM modules. That's how we came across GTW"recalls Markus Hägele.

GTW was able to convince the Post team with its profound know-how around BRIM and also brought along the comprehensive practical experience from similar large-scale projects. In addition, GTW was one of the few service providers on the market with sufficient consulting resources to be able to handle such a project at all. Other references in Switzerland were also important to Swiss Post, and GTW was able to come up with two well-known large companies, Swisscom and the Swiss Federal Railway. "In the SAP environment in Switzerland, word of something like this gets around pretty quickly"knows Christoph Granig, who works as a manager at GTW Switzerland. "We then also paid a reference visit to the railroad, which finally convinced us of the GTW." adds Markus Hägele.

SAP BRIM is virtually predestined for the commercial customer sector with over one million invoices per year. "There we have the right volume of data for such a powerful billing solution with different pricing and discount structures, with upstream systems collecting incredible amounts of data"explains Markus Hägele. "For us, it is an enormous advantage that SAP has designed the system for mass processing, because otherwise we would have to build a lot of systems and add-ons around it to be able to handle this mass. Then the ERP would eventually degenerate into an accounting and invoice printing machine." By the way, anyone who switches to S/4 already has BRIM pre-installed and could start using it immediately after acquiring a license; there is currently a lack of BRIM know-how on the market alone.

The Harmonization of Value Flows (HWF) project is all about increasing efficiency and saving costs. However, this will only work if all legacy systems are really standardized, centralized and then shut down. Markus Hägele comments: "At Swiss Post, we have historically grown a large and very complex IT architecture with many legacy systems, so a lot of things have to be dismantled again, and old habits have to be removed in order to get to a modern standard level with SAP S/4." In the meantime, the old invoicing solutions were largely replaced by BRIMs, which were no longer state of the art and had reached the end of their lifecycle.

Start small

Initially, Swiss Post approached the mammoth SAP BRIM project with smaller processes. The first smaller BRIM implementation was realized by GTW for Swiss Post Solutions, which offers digital services such as scanning and office solutions but is no longer part of Swiss Post. The prototype from the BRIM Model Company could be tested right away.

Then it was determined where else the pressure was greatest to replace SAP SD. This was the partner business, i.e. grocery stores, kiosks and individuals who offer postal services, for example, parcel acceptance, stamp sales and other postal services. The Post has several thousand branch partners - and the number of partners is continuously increasing.

This marked the start of the first major project: BRIM for FiLP for billing partner agencies. "There, the changeover was most urgent: The invoicing with an Access solution had long since reached its limit. Only a certain number of branch partners could be billed and then nothing worked anymore.explains Philipp Muri. And Christoph Granig adds: "We were forced to move to a new solution, but the bottleneck is that a lot is still done manually in the branch area, and BRIM is actually designed for automated mass invoicing." Due to the manual activities, the branch area still needs three hours for invoicing; this is to be successively reduced. At least no more incorrect invoices are issued now, as was previously the case in Access and Excel, because internal validation and checking processes run in SAP. This ensures good process integrity even over extremely large volumes. 

Amazon and Zalando at customs

Since January of this year, customs clearance has also been using the new invoicing solution - this is a subarea of logistics services and the first really big BRIM changeover. To this end, it is important to know that Swiss Post handles the customs clearance and invoicing of letters and parcels in cross-border import and export. All parcel shipments that enter Switzerland via Amazon or Zalando are also cleared through customs at Swiss Post's logistics centers. That's hundreds of thousands of shipments per day that are cleared through customs, invoiced and booked in BRIM. Master data is created, invoices are generated, and in some cases the required customs amount has to be paid immediately - all this has to be done with high performance. "It's a critical process, if there's anything wrong, then we can't collect the customs fees correctly"Markus Hägele explains the importance of this BRIM conversion. And because the project was successful, the trust in BRIM as a reliable invoicing system has also increased sustainably among the other departments.

BRIM can do even more

At the same time, the entire international traffic accounting system went live with SAP BRIM. In this process, international mail items are mutually settled. If, for example, a letter sack is full, a so-called card closing, it is settled with the recipient country against incoming letter sacks. Swiss Post handles the clearing to all postal companies worldwide, which has been implemented in SAP BRIM. "Hundreds of millions are offset in the company's own currency, the SFR. With the new billing solution, this runs with high performance, Markus Hägele adds. The individual programming, manual data entry and high administrative effort were simply no longer justifiable. "Now it's a transparent and clean solution with BRIM." 

The BRIM project of Swiss Post

• 2017 to 2018 Analysis phase: SAP BRIM feasibility study based on the S/4 BRIM Model Company (available today as SSC - S/4 Hana BRIM Standard Content).
• 2019: Implementation BRIM for SPS (Swiss Post Solutions) with the SAP Convergent Invoicing and SAP Contract Accounting modules.
• 2020: Implementation of SAP BRIM for FilP (branch with partner) with the modules SAP Subscription Order Management, SAP Convergent Invoicing and SAP Contract Accounting.
• 2020 and 2021: Implementation of SAP BRIM for Logistics Services with the SAP Convergent Invoicing and SAP Contract Accounting modules
• Fall 2022: Conversion of KUREPO to SAP BRIM with the SAP Convergent Charging, SAP Convergent Invoicing and SAP Contract Accounting modules.

All project phases were and will be carried out with the same central core team consisting of Swiss Post IT, GTW and SAP.