My name is Thomas Kaiser and I am a BTS Consultant with a focus on project and quality management, I’ve been with SAP since 2008. Recently, I implemented SAP ERP FI/CO and SAP HCM (personnel administration) solution for an employment agency and replaced 48 legacy systems. This customer had a few challenges with their Finance and HCM departments, such as they needed to:
- Substitute 48 legacy systems to a modern ERP standard software
- Reconnect 35 business applications to the ERP system
- Avoid any disruption for the business during the roll-out period
- Implement double bookkeeping, while keeping the demand of fiscal accounting requirements
By the way, the customer has more than 100,000 employees with 176 agencies and approximately 610 branch offices in Germany.
The Project Goal
The goal of this project was to resolve the customer’s issues with their Finance department’s payments process, as well as increase the efficiency for their personnel management, specifically we needed to:
- Implement new standard SAP processes and replace the old ones, thus helping improve transparency and controlling, as well as the efficiency of the company’s financial and personnel resources.
- Harmonize the data model and holistically optimize processes to ensure the working ability of the customer
- Ensures the integration of new (legal) requirements.
- Guarantee the new SAP system improved IT support for all business processes
- Implement a centralized and modern ERP solution that replaces the old technical environment (hard-/software)
- Map the customer’s processes in SAP
Quality Manager
This project, which started in 2008, was a joint effort between SAP Services and our Partner Accenture – we both had the same goal of making this employment agency solve their Finance and HR business challenges with SAP solutions. My role is that project was the Quality Manager – my responsibilities included:
- Setting up the constructive quality management
- Setting up the analytical quality management
- Keeping the processes running
At the beginning of the project, we executed a short need analysis for the customer and developed a quality management process:
- Established a QA process for all project documents (Quality of Documents) like business blueprints, designs etc. Defined guidelines, as well as QA guidelines and introduction of a set of standard templates.
- Established and supported test management for the project (Quality of Software). Supported the test manager by setting-up test execution plans and consolidated respective statistics for the QA project report.
- Established and executed continuous process improvement for the project. Identified and responded to the realization of process improvements.
Apart from planning, ensuring, monitoring and improving, as Quality Manager, I needed to consolidate results and discuss them with both the customer project and my SAP project lead. I then needed to review all of the project deliverables which were handed over to the customer - E.g. to check if all remarks in the blueprint were finalized, check that every test case were execute and sign-off successfully prepare and execute the handover activities.
The Results
The end result of the project was that we substituted a wide range of outdated technologies and programming languages, operating systems and databases. The new SAP environment managed over 15 million bank transactions each month with a total amount of € 10 billion. In addition, during the blueprint phase, we generated over 550 documents/blueprints, executed nearly 10,000 test cases. We had about 250 full-time equivalents in the project over a period of two and half years. After rollout 30,000 users logged on to the new system on the first day. Today, about 100,000 users work on the system in a regular manner.
