IBM Services leads the way in helping clients accelerate
modernization of enterprise systems, with more than 100 clients now
live with SAP S/4HANA
ARMONK, New York, Dec. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE:
IBM) today announced it has completed more than 100 successful SAP
S/4HANA implementations that are enabling companies to speed up
their digital reinventions.
As companies look to simplify increasingly complex business
processes and upgrade their technology infrastructure, SAP S/4HANA
allows companies to enable new capabilities not available before,
helping them lay the foundation for easier adoption of innovative
technology such as AI and blockchain.
Smart & Final Stores, a value-oriented food and everyday
staples retailer, recently turned to IBM Services as the company
set out to reinvent their operational business processes, beginning
with modernizing their financial processes and systems. By adopting
SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC),
Smart & Final has created a financial backbone, a central
digital platform which optimizes financial processes and harmonizes
data centrally. Coupled with their e-commerce transformation,
these new capabilities will help the retailer gain a better
understanding of their customers and deliver an enhanced in-store
experience. Key to embarking on this journey was to adopt the right
approach to SAP S/4HANA that helped ensure a continuous path to
improved business performance, enhanced employee experience and
operational efficiencies to support future growth.
Clients across industries are opting for pre-configured industry
solutions. Based on IBM research, pre-configured industry solutions
have increased implementation speed up to 30
percent1. Drawing on its long term relationship
with SAP and deep understanding of IT environments, IBM Services
created pre-configured industry specific accelerators – IBM Impact
Industry Solutions – designed to bring together and enhance
existing IBM and SAP services to help accelerate SAP S/4HANA
adoption. These solutions, combined with IBM's Impact Assessment,
help companies increase quality and success in the change
process.
"SAP S/4HANA can represent a significant shift in a company's
entire business model, allowing them to transform processes,
integrate new technology and quickly turn their focus on new market
opportunities. The way companies implement the platform is critical
and has a significant impact on their business down the road," said
Mark Foster, Senior Vice President,
IBM Global Business Services. "All clients have different
starting points and requirements to drive their digital
transformations. Having advised hundreds of clients and completed
100 transformations, our consultants bring this deep insight and
knowledge to streamline transformation journeys and unlock the
benefits for clients as quickly as possible."
With more than 100 transformations complete, IBM Services is
guiding more than 200 leading global companies in their SAP S/4HANA
implementations to help drive their digital transformation,
including:
- Cleco, a regulated utility company, embarked on the
intelligent enterprise journey leveraging SAP S/4HANA as a means to
transform. IBM Services is helping Cleco to replace its core
technology by shifting it from multiple systems to one primary
system on SAP S/4HANA. This transformation, while improving the
company's processes in nearly every area, is seeing real benefits
in terms of speed of execution due to IBM's industry specific
approach.
- Toyota Indus Motor Company, a manufacturer, assembler,
distributor and importer of Toyota vehicles, spare parts and
accessories in Pakistan, needed to
compete with a surge of foreign entrants in the country's auto
market. By transforming front-to-back operations with SAP S/4HANA
on high-performance IBM POWER8 servers, its decisions were
empowered with real-time data-driven tools to boost manufacturing
efficiency.
- Logoplaste, a leading plastics packaging manufacturer,
needed to implement a global business management tool that would
bring its data into a single automated data platform across
procurement, production and planning so that the company could take
advantage of an IoT approach. IBM Services upgraded Logoplaste from
SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA quickly with no downtime for the
manufacturing plants. The new approach gave the company the ability
to provide real-time information to its supply-chain partners and
paved the way for the digital innovation based on further SAP
solutions.
"Successful Digital Transformations requires a strong business
value case, and a well-defined technical roadmap that is closely
aligned with the company's current and future strategy," said
Michael Kleinemeier, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE,
Digital Business Services. "The many successful SAP S/4HANA
projects delivered by SAP and IBM are the great proof points, that
our investments into business value assets help our joint clients
to make the intelligent enterprise a reality. Aligning the SAP
Model Company and IBM Impact Solutions accelerators are good
examples of how the partnership delivers in-depth industry
functionality, and at the same time accelerates time to value."
Together, IBM Services and SAP are helping to accelerate
customers' digital transformations across many industries.
The partners continue to enhance their intelligent enterprise
platform to deliver new insights and capabilities that speed
innovation. Recently, IBM introduced an accelerated Bluefield
migration approach that automates the process and conversion to
provide a fast and flexible path to SAP S/4HANA
transformation. In addition, IBM Impact Industry solutions are
now available on multiple cloud environments, including IBM Cloud
Private, and IBM is working closely with SAP to develop Industry
Cloud solutions on IBM Cloud Private that can enable clients to
securely tap into powerful technologies such as AI, Blockchain and
others.
Client Quotes:
"Smart & Final is realizing operational efficiency and
business capabilities to sustain our growth with SAP's S/4HANA
digital core and IBM as our transformation partner," said
Edward Wong, SVP CIO, Smart &
Final.
"A major part of our decision to move to SAP S/4HANA now
factored on our review of the IBM IMPACT industry solutions," said
Mark Northrup, General Manager and
Chief Information Officer, Cleco. "From our analysis, the volume of
pre-configured industry processes and accelerators has allowed us
to jump start our implementation, show our stakeholders a working
system on day one and will accelerate our overall time to
value."
"SAP S/4HANA provides the enabling technology for our business
strategy. We can understand how our processes are running, improve
quality and reduce the amount of wastage. In the future, we can for
instance demonstrate that bottles have passed clients' standards by
showing them how we control the production process in real time,
leading to faster delivery, better customer service and reduced
costs," said Conceição Menezes, Chief Digital Officer at
Logoplaste. "IBM Services is an essential partner for Logoplaste,
delivering advanced SAP solutions that give us agility and
flexibility. Finance, production and executive teams can harness
new tools that will drive business operations into the future.
Thanks to SAP and IBM, Logoplaste gains process transparency from
shop-floor to top-floor that enable us to make better
information-based decisions that we couldn't make before."
"We are now living in a world where consumers are
better-informed than ever. We see that the best way to win sales
and nurture loyalty is by building a reputation as the most
trusted, highest-quality automotive brand in the market,"said
Faizan Mustafa, CIO/Head of IT at
Indus Motor Company Ltd. "SAP S/4HANA will become the nervous
system that collects and analyzes data from across the business,
and transforms that data into actionable insight. Our
decision-makers will have up-to-the-minute information at their
fingertips to make better-informed strategic decisions, improving
the accuracy of our sales orders and delivering the highest level
of customer service. Thanks to our IBM and SAP solutions, we are
achieving the digital transformation that will help us strengthen
our competitiveness in a fast-moving marketplace."
About IBM
For more information about IBM Services,
visit https://www.ibm.com/services.
For more information about IBM's SAP services, visit
https://www.ibm.com/services/sap.
Sources:
[1] Based on analysis of
project estimates and actuals by IBM's Impact Project Estimation
Team
Media Contact:
Marisa Conway
IBM Media Relations
conwaym@us.ibm.com
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