SAP® S/4HANA Conversion in Safe Hands

Founded as a family business in 1950, the company, with around 1800 employees at 37 different locations, is now one of Europe’s big success stories when it comes to hot-dip galvanizing. Today, the company operates in coating and lattice mast construction. Its day-to-day activities include safe and sustainable corrosion protection of steel in different forms and usage areas, guaranteed by high-quality products and high process quality, all tailored to customer requirements. For more than 40 years, the company has been the recipient of environmental awards for its sustainable activities and climate protection. Innovation is a constant driver, also for the IT system landscape. Based on a long-standing and successful business relationship, Wiegel is happy to rely on the expertise of NTT DATA Business Solutions.

Carefully Considered Approach: SAP S/4HANA Conversion

The switch to SAP S/4HANA gives companies the opportunity to innovate their own system landscape and to benefit from the latest technologies. It allows companies to exploit the potential of their own business processes, especially when establishing integrative and interdepartmental workflows. Within this, there are multiple paths that lead to the (transition’s) destination – either new implementation on the greenfield or conversion to convert selective existing parts of the ERP system (brownfield). In view of the pending end to maintenance of the old system, the Wiegel Group consciously opted for the benefits of an SAP S/4HANA conversion, with the additional benefit of there being as few changes as possible for end users in the initial step. Wiegel was also keen to take a well-considered approach to the conversion, characterized by a comprehensive testing phase of more than 1,000 test cases and an extensive test catalog. The test phase was seen as essential to ensuring a reliable conversion. One major benefit of the project was users’ existing familiarity with SAP, allowing them to kick off with existing cumulative knowledge. This also meant that Wiegel could implement the custom code independently, with the support of NTT DATA Business Solutions.

The Highlights: Credit Management and General Ledger Accounting

The project’s highlights include the introduction of the new business partner concept (Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI), with the generation of 125,000 BP masters in two
hours on the production machine), incl. personnel master/ business partner synchronization, migration of credit management with integration of customer-specific fields for
credit reports in the business partner master, implementation of parallel currencies in the new general ledger accounting, and introduction of SAP Fiori apps for house banks.

100% Schedule Satisfaction: Delivering on time and on budget

After a period of fifteen months, which included tests on the sandbox, it was high time to celebrate the project’s successful go-live in terms of both time and budget. Wiegel
can now enjoy the comprehensive functions offered by the new system landscape.