S/4 Finance @ Azure

Alegri International Group is one of the major IT consultancies for Microsoft and SAP, Managed Services and Internet of Things in the German-speaking SAP community. Now the company set itself the challenge: to create a financial accounting and reporting system for the future.

The legacy system previously used no longer met the increased requirements of an international group. A reporting system was now required that could present different company codes across countries as well as individual cost centers and profit centers in the required granularity.

Due to the steadily increasing agility of the consulting business, there was also an urgent need for ad hoc reporting.

"In order to optimize the financial flows and to be able to provide a reliable forecast into the future at any time, the traditional monthly financial statements were no longer sufficient"

explains Gregor Emhart, CFO of the Alegri International Group. The solution: implementation of S/4 Finance.

Due to the SAP expertise available in-house, the partnership with SAP, and the functionality advised by SAP, Alegri opted for the new S/4 Finance after a selection process in the fall of 2015.

"If we were going to make the switch from a legacy system to a modern ERP system, we also wanted to start the project with the latest version of SAP"

says CFO Gregor Emhart.

"First and foremost, I was interested in the possibility of reducing time-to-close."

Another advantage is also the harmonization between FI and CO and thus a significantly simplified and reduced reconciliation between these areas. Alegri wanted to establish this advantage right away during the new implementation of S/4 Finance, so that Alegri's back office can immediately take advantage of the higher efficiency.

"We have a very lean setup and therefore high productivity is essential for us"

Gregor Emhart continues.

Since Alegri was implementing S/4 Finance for the first time, the processes could be introduced accordingly right away. Here, Alegri had the advantage over an existing SAP customer, where the relevant processes first had to be converted and trained.

After a short and intensive blueprint phase, the basic features of the processes were defined and the implementation could begin. Here, the cloud approach with Microsoft Azure was chosen due to the many years of experience and cooperation with Microsoft. Alegri is one of the first companies in the world to successfully use this combination.

In each case, the Hana database runs on virtualized servers with Suse SLES for SAP, while the application servers and Solution Manager run on a server with Microsoft Windows Server.

The cooperation of the systems was not affected by the different operating systems. Of course, know-how for both operating systems had to be available for the administrative activities that occurred from time to time.

Since Alegri has Microsoft and SAP expertise in-house, this was no problem. Hana proved to be a robust and low-maintenance database - and some exemplary reports were able to demonstrate its performance in an impressive way.

"Our initial thought that we might still need a business warehouse for evaluation could thus be shelved right away. Even though the amount of data will increase over time, these evaluations are performant enough to provide me with data in the shortest possible time, which I received from our old system overnight at best".

Gregor Emhart explains further.

What is also impressive is that changes to the reports can be implemented immediately and there are no ETL processes to consider.

"Since switching to S/4 Finance, I have full transparency in Controlling at the push of a button. Management can make decisions faster based on timely information. In addition, I can also look forward to the next audit with confidence."

Gregor Emhart sums up the internal project.