Kemira - HighSpeed Carve-Out

The sale of the ChemSolutions division to the Belgian chemical company Taminco required the business unit to be spun off from the Kemira world as quickly as possible.

This required a carve-out of all relevant data from the existing SAP system landscape in order to establish it in a separate legal entity.

For this short-term project, Kemira relied on the holistic support of the Heidelberg-based management consultancy cbs Corporate Business Solutions.

Using minimally invasive methods, cbs enabled the project to be implemented quickly, at short notice and safely.

The global chemical company attaches great importance to globally coordinated processes and a uniform SAP system. This should also be ensured as quickly as possible after the transaction.

For this reason, it was necessary to perform a carve-out of all relevant data. This involved specifically and completely cutting out the ChemSolutions area, which was integrated into Kemira's global SAP system, and forming a separate legal entity.

To do this, the relevant data and processes had to be converted so that they could then be transferred to the new unit.

Only little time

The particular challenge here was the tight schedule and the limited free capacities on the part of Kemira. The task was to implement this project during the M&A (merger & acquisition) process without interrupting ongoing business processes.

In addition, several plants where the ChemSolutions business unit was located and produced were involved in the spin-off.

This was a challenging task, as these plants also produce for other divisions within the Group. This made the project complex and required comprehensive solutions.

Due to the tight schedule of only eight weeks, special project management skills were required in addition to proven SAP expertise. The SAP consultants from cbs met both criteria.

In particular, the comprehensive restructuring expertise paid off in this context. This is because cbs can look back on a large number of projects in the area of transformation of SAP system landscapes (SLT) and offers a broad portfolio of proven methods and tools for this purpose.

The standard software cbs ET Enterprise Transformer developed by cbs makes it possible to implement complex transactions at short notice. This also played the decisive role in this project.

By combining the extensive experience of the cbs consultants and the tools from the cbs ET, they were able to implement the data harmonization, data migration, and carve-out in a tight timeframe.

Step by step

In this way, it was also possible to safely realize the project goals without interrupting ongoing business processes. As a first fundamental step, cbs set up a company code in the same client in order to initially establish a separate legal entity.

The consultants then transferred all relevant master and transaction data to the new unit, where they then created it automatically.

Selecting the data to be transferred and migrated to the new unit was a particular challenge. All main ERP modules, the entire SAP Business Warehouse (BW) as well as SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), SAP Environment and Health & Safety (EHS) were affected.

Therefore, the project team decided to perform data selection and subsequent migration based on selected criteria and positive lists.

In addition, the cbs consultants converted all processes still open in the existing unit. This made it possible to complete these processes in the existing unit and transfer them to the new unit at the same time.

The use of the cbs ET Enterprise Transformer proved to be ideal for this task. With it, the management consultants were able to unerringly cut out the ChemSolutions business unit and all associated data and documents from the existing company code and integrate them into a new legal entity in a minimally invasive manner.

Conclusion

The minimally invasive methodology of cbs enabled the successful carve-out of ChemSolutions from Kemira's existing SAP unit.

Beforehand, the project team established a new company code and a separate legal entity. The team then converted and harmonized all relevant data to guarantee a smooth transfer.

The SAP consultants performed all of this without disrupting or interrupting Kemira's daily business processes.

Thanks to the chosen method, cbs was able to carry out all steps in a targeted and efficient manner. As a result, the SAP consultants were able to meet all project goals without exceeding the planned budget.

In doing so, cbs always stayed on time and successfully completed the project within the short project duration of only eight weeks.