Simplicity with system

All too often - in our personal lives and in the business world - we tend to complicate and confuse things in order to position ourselves better. By contrast, Yell.com's digital mission was a refreshingly bold approach: to simplify its existing IT architecture to increase its competitiveness.

The days of printed business directories, the Yellow Pages that used to be posted in every mailbox, are long gone at Yell. In their place is an online marketplace where local businesses, organizations and retailers can interact with consumers. With stiff competition from companies such as Google and Bing, as well as industry-specific online directories, technical flexibility and organizational ability are essential to delivering the outstanding user experiences customers have come to expect from Yell for over 50 years now.

"We knew we needed to modernize our IT landscape to stay competitive," explains Gaurav Swarup, technical director at Yell.com. "Our SAP ECC 6.0 installation was outdated. To stay current, moving our data in the U.K. to SAP S/4HANA seemed like the best way to become more real-time as a company and more responsive to market demands."

The Microsoft Azure Cloud was quickly found to be the ideal hosting partner due to its flexibility and scalability. Now an implementation partner had to plan the move and implement the data migration without any disruptions.

After successful exploratory talks and a very convincing recommendation from Microsoft, Yell.com chose Syniti (formerly BackOffice Associates). Our detailed understanding of the possibilities and features of SAP S/4HANA, as well as the good reputation Syniti has already earned in numerous data management and migration projects at the world's largest companies, were decisive factors.

Our certified SAP S/4HANA experts guided Yell.com through our proven discovery process: an in-depth design-driven workshop outlined Yell.com's unique requirements and then mapped out how Yell's data would look in our S/4HANA demo system.

As a result of this process, it quickly became clear that data deletion and archiving, as well as data quality assurance, would be key elements for Yell.com. Deleting or archiving historical and irrelevant data would achieve significant cost savings in data hosting and management, and Yell.com was excited to see how the Syniti team planned to make this happen.

Following the workshop, the Syniti team presented the roadmap to S/4HANA with "Simplicity" as the core theme, which showed how we would guide Yell.com through the migration process. We presented our proposed solutions for data archiving, while reducing 50% of systems in Yell's architecture to eliminate the technical issues caused by the legacy IT landscape.

Convinced of the clear business value of this proposal, Yell.com launched the project in July 2018, and while "simplicity" is not always easy to achieve, the project was completed on target, on time, and on budget, as expected.

The data migration to SAP S/4HANA in Microsoft Azure Cloud was completed without incident in March 2019, thanks to the successful partnership between the Syniti, Microsoft and Yell.com teams.

"The cooperation with Syniti was more than the usual supplier-customer relationship, it was a true partnership," confirms Gaurav Swarup. "Whenever the Syniti team saw an opportunity to integrate new techniques or technologies beyond the specifications, they briefly explained the situation to us and why they thought it would be an improvement. This ensured that the program never became inflexible and we could easily implement new ideas for better results."

Looking to the future, Yell.com is now well positioned to take advantage of the new simplified architecture. Moreover - in continuation of the "simplicity" strategy - further projects are already under discussion.

To learn more about how Syniti can help you on your SAP S/4HANA journey, visit syniti.com or contact us at info@syniti.com.

[adrotate banner="125″]