Sonepar Deutschland GmbH (Sonepar) decided to switch to the SAP ERP S/4HANA software as a future-proof and advanced IT basis. FIS was Sonepar’s implementation partner for the project as in 2012 already and has ever since provided the Sonepar data centers with application support and managed services together with its FIS-ASP subsidiary. Sonepar now wants to make consistent use of the opportunities and possibilities offered by the new S/4HANA system.
The challenges were manifold: As a trading company, Sonpear traditionally has a very high transaction volume. The existing document volume of 2.4 billion document lines and almost 500 million documents had to be prepared in such a way that the data could be completely migrated over an extended weekend. It was therefore one of the largest S/4HANA transitions in Germany up to now in terms of document volume
Migrations of this size also require sufficient computing power. “For this purpose, we were able to provide appropriate memory from our own server landscape and used everything we had in terms of computer capacity for the migration. With FIS-ASP, we had a strong and experienced partner at our side,” says Mark Michaelis, managing director at Sonepar Deutschland Information Services GmbH.
FIS was awarded the contract for the transition “due to the market orientation towards wholesale, the high expertise in the industry-specific SAP implementation as well as the long-standing partnership,” explains Mr. Michaelis.
The Brownfield approach with a step-by-step approach was selected as implementation strategy. In the first project step, Sonepar replaced the previous Oracle database with the SAP HANA database in May 2018. In the following month, customers and vendors were converted to “business partner” as a new master data object, which was a prerequisite for the SAP S/4HANA transition. Finally, in November 2018, the transition to the new financial software and document migration to HANA followed. SAP S/4HANA was then connected to other applications in the company via a distinctive interface landscape. The project with FIS and FIS-ASP was successfully completed right on schedule.
“A series of jobs are already running much faster with the new HANA-based financial accounting system. Nevertheless, we have only created the technical basis to make optimal use of this technology for us. In the future, we will fully exploit the chances and possibilities offered by the S/4HANA system,” states Mr. Michaelis after go-live.
