Stryker – Project Accelerate
Business Transformation leveraging SAP S/4HANA 1709
Are you looking for a successful Business Transformation use case?
Are you about to start an SAP S/4HANA greenfield implementation project?
Welcome to this blog, wherein I illustrated my recent engagement experience for a customer and our journey.
Background –
Stryker Corporation is one of the world’s leading medical technology companies, offering innovative products and services in Orthopedics, Medical and Surgical Equipment. Their business primarily involves servicing and marketing products directly to doctors, hospitals and other healthcare facilities or selling through sales subsidiaries as well as third-party dealers and distributors.
With over 10+ years SAP solution and operation experience, Stryker already has a long and continuous engagement history with SAP.
With multiple acquisitions and mergers, Stryker’s IT landscape became complex (multiples systems), redundant (multiple master data), difficult to maintain. With SAP S/4HANA 1709 Implementation, Stryker’s objective was to deploy a Global ERP program that will deploy an SAP template – enabling process transformation, driving standardization and supporting simplification; resulting in increased operational efficiencies, cost reductions, and improved customer service. One of the key aspects in the implementation of SAP S/4HANA is to embrace the fit-to-standard mindset focusing on re-use the pre-configured content from SAP Model Company and introducing custom code and enhancements only where needed to meet business need
Completing the project has been the culmination of rigorous planning, concerted team effort and adherence to timelines. Stryker recently went live with SAP S/4HANA 1709 Implementation in Aug 2019, along with integrated ERP solution involving systems such as SAP Ariba, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP EWM, SAP TM, SAP Master Data Governance, Descartes.
What’s the relevance for customer –
Accelerate Project was christened around Feb 2017 with primary business goals:
- Harmonize processes, enable common language and ways of working across business units and geographies for Stryker globally.
- Enable End-to-End order management and service management; to improve and optimize complex global order management process.
- Optimize cost through an efficient management of operating cost and inventory lead time.
- Enable rapid digitalization through better flexible platform, supporting divisions to drive business decisions.
- Automate processes as much as possible to help and augment business users with more flexibility and focus for business and reduced error possibility.
Robust Roadmap planning to reap the benefits –
For each of the above goals, strategy and solutions were identified –
- Project leveraged “Assemble to Order” (A2O) approach, using multiple best practice components, such as SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) and other Engineered Services.
- SAP S/4HANA 1709 Green field implementation was initiated to simplify Order Management process, along with SAP Best Practices.
- SAP Decentralized Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) was integrated with SAP S/4HANA system to manage inventory in the Warehouse, to support processing of goods movement, and to provide better visibility to plan, track inventory across the divisions.
- SAP Transport Management, along with Descartes Integration, enabled efficient planning, shipping & tracking online capabilities
- SAP Integrated Business Planning solution improved the forecasting and demand planning, thereby generating full demand transparency with short-term, mid-term, and long-term forecasting.
- SAP Ariba is implemented to manage the efficient procurement and invoicing processes for vendor management.
- SAP Master Data Governance used as “Single Source of Truth” for Master Data, providing centralized governance to keep one version of data flowing across the enterprise.
- BW Reports, Analytics, Embedded Reports, BEX Queries were identified to provide unified and consistent data aggregation between 3rd party and SAP data.
- SAP PI/PO and SAP CPI-DS to integrate SAP S/4HANA with SAP TM, SAP EWM, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP Ariba & other 30 third party systems (involving ModelN, Trackwise, GIM, Encompass, Demantra, Windchill, Salesforce and many more).
- SAP Data services for Data migration and Data load.
An example of integration scenario with different systems, along with different data interaction between the systems is provided below.
IT Benefits:
- Replaced a customized legacy solution with standardized seamless integrated ERP solution and provided the capability for future scalability.
- Single system for all business needs and end to end tracking for order and financial transactions.
- Balanced demand and supply, while providing unified organizational visibility.
High Level Architecture:
- Integration Scenario: Cloud systems
As part of landscape transformation, conscious decision was taken to leverage cloud application capabilities. SAP Master Data Governance system was used as “single source of data” for all master data. Salesforce ServiceMax system was integrated with SAP S/4HANA using Advantco adapter with SAP PI/PO as middleware, to provide extended capability of scheduling optimization, self service Field operations, work order management. SAP Integrated Business Planning was integrated with SAP S/4HANA through Cloud Platform Integration (CPI-DS), to plan forecast and plan future demand profitably with real-time supply chain management. SAP Ariba integration was provided to improve communications, to synchronize procurement and to facilitate better transparency between departments and vendors (buyers and suppliers).
* Below data flow is not a full exhaustive list of all systems involved in Stryker Landscape or all interactions between different systems. Actual Stryker Landscape has more than 30 system, however, only critical system interaction are represented below for a quick understanding of the complexity and challenges involved.
2. Integration scenario: SAP Internal systems
A seamless yet striking process flow involving SAP S/4HANA – SAP EWM – SAP TM – GTS – QM systems, starting with creation of Outbound Delivery in S/4HANA system and flowing through all different systems is illustrated below. Process Automation was achieved using iFlows and dynamic routing techniques for integration and workflows for job scheduling.
* Below process flow is not a full exhaustive solution architecture, but selected an end-to-end process spreading across different systems.
Conclusion –
With mainstream maintenance phase for older SAP ECC releases ending, more customers are leveraging and benefitting from implementation of cloud centric solution landscapes with a preconfigured, out-of-the-box, cloud native solution. With such preconfigured processes, that are extendable and adoptable to a customer’s individual needs; customers can achieve faster time-to-value and Automated collection and assignment of tasks to the project team.
Experiences and Feedback –
If any one of you were involved in the execution or been part of this project, I would love to hear back from you. Please post your feedback and comments or questions, if any.
Okumaya devam et...