Progress report: A CIO’s cloud migration journey to S/4HANA

The ANWR Group, a Mainhausen-based community of financial services and retailers in the footwear, sporting goods, and leather goods industries, has, until 2018, used the ERP system of its bank subsidiary DZB Bank, and as a result, banking sector regulations for financial accounting and controlling also applied to the retail area of ​​the company.

Over time, these regulations became more restrictive, and the flexibility needed for the trading industry was no longer available. “We had already started separating the IT systems a few years earlier in order to better prepare both the bank and the trading companies for the respective requirements,” recalls ANWR Group CIO Sven Kulikowsky. The ERP software was the last shared system.

Together in the greenfield

ANWR adopts a cloud-first strategy for new IT projects, and in 2018, the IT department tackled the migration to SAP S/4HANA together with the business areas of financial accounting and controlling. There was already knowledge of the solutions from the Walldorf-based software company since the previous core system was an on-premises SAP R/3 that was heavily modified. So the new environment really had to be based on a greenfield approach in the public cloud set up by SAP.

“It was extremely important to get the departments on board from the start,” says Kulikowsky. Together they determined what the new solution had to be able to do from the start. In joint workshops, mixed teams from business departments and the IT evaluated the capabilities and degree of maturity of the cloud platform.

Agile with purpose

In order to organize the change, a steering committee was formed as the highest control body. Underneath, a project board formed as a control team from Kulikowsky and his counterparts in financial accounting and controlling, which coordinated with the project manager of the external partner Camelot ITLab for two hours a week. The team received input from cross-functional working groups made up of staff and external consultants, who discussed problems with specific processes. “We were able to quickly compare different opinions and make decisions,” says Kulikowsky. As a result, departments and IT have always pulled together.

He set a goal of migrating all systems to the new environment by the end of 2021, and the 2021 annual financial statements created with S/4HANA. Plus, the 2022 financial year was to start without the old environment, and to do this, Kulikowsky defined nine waves.

Cloud Management, SAP