Within the newest episode of SAP Higher Collectively: Buyer Conversations, Sylvie Otton Sollod hosted a dialogue of a challenge to overtake the monetary techniques at Watco, a transportation options supplier headquartered in Pittsburg, Kansas.

The corporate owns and operates a various community of quick line railroads, terminals, ports, and restore terminals. It has grown by means of numerous mergers and acquisitions, has round 5,000 workers, and is planning for additional speedy progress.

However to assist this, they wanted to rethink their core techniques, with a transfer from on-premise SAP ECC to S/4HANA within the cloud with RISE with SAP. They turned to the mixing capabilities of SAP Enterprise Know-how Platform to plug in different functions and supply a basis for future modifications.

And one of many key objectives of the challenge was offering extra well timed, correct data straight into the fingers of the folks implementing enterprise technique. To assist this, the corporate took the chance to maneuver from BusinessObjects WebIntelligence to SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP HANA for high-performance reporting and planning,

Andy Nielsen, Senior Vice President of Finance and Accounting at Watco defined that the corporate needs to develop and enhance buyer providers, however “you need to have plan in place. You may’t get up and simply resolve ‘I need to be nice right now’!”

The corporate has a strategic plan, a marketing strategy, and a monetary plan. And so they wished to be sure that monetary plan was within the fingers of all people throughout the enterprise so they might regulate and adapt when (inevitably) issues do go as deliberate.

Like all finance departments, they cherished Excel. However with progress issues began slowing down: they couldn’t use Excel for monetary planning throughout 400 completely different places and rapidly get knowledge again within the fingers of people that wanted it.

For instance, traditionally, they might have determined to regulate diesel gas prices, however that meant going into 100 completely different information to make the modifications, and will take per week to roll up all these modifications and see the general end result. Now the corporate can do the identical factor in thirty minutes or much less.

Corey Corrick, VP of Purposes at Watco, defined a few of the classes discovered alongside the best way, together with working intently with the customers to grasp and assist their wants, for instance letting them mix analytics with the power to drill down into particular person transactions utilizing SAP Fiori interfaces.

Different classes discovered lined within the interview embrace:

• Ensuring that folks had time to do the challenge proper: “all of us have day jobs!”. Crucially, this included deciding what wasn’t going to get executed, with a view to create capability for challenge success.
• How to make sure the corporate didn’t get locked into the “that is how we’ve all the time executed it” syndrome.
• How the corporate ensured communications at each part of the challenge, together with very frequent check-ins: “It shocked me how typically we had been going within the improper course!”
• Using agile ideas, rolling out smaller modifications as rapidly as doable, and letting folks have interaction and provides suggestions, particularly with reporting and planning. “We made positive customers have been included within the blueprinting, design and testing”
• The significance of inside and exterior partnerships — companions included Nimbl (now Avvale), Evaluation Prime, and Platinum DB. They turned to consultants as a result of “we all know we don’t know what we don’t know!”

To learn extra, take a look at my publish on blogs.sap.com