Vodafone builds smart enterprise on SAP S/4 Hana

Vodafone’s SAP estate, based on an S/4 Hana enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, has become a keystone of the telecoms company’s transformation into a smart enterprise, according to two of its corporate business technology leaders.

Holger Grewe, group head of corporate transformation, and Ignacio Garcia, CIO of corporate systems, at Vodafone, depict the telecommunications supplier’s relationship with SAP as strategic in nature, not merely a supplier-customer one.

Working with SAP and Accenture, Vodafone has established a single digital core based on the ERP system SAP S/4 Hana in a manner that might have leapt off a conference slide deck. The implementation’s aim was to improve operational efficiency in business functions such as finance, supply chain and IT, and it was carried out in a big-bang roll-out across 26 countries, for 130 plus legal entities.

The system go-live was at the end of November 2019. The project took 18 months, moving Vodafone’s single-instance SAP Enterprise Core Components (ECC) system to become one of the five largest SAP S/4 Hana instances worldwide, with the largest number of fixed assets in any single-instance SAP system globally. 

The project also included global roll-outs of SAP’s peripheral software-as-a-service products Concur, SuccessFactors and Ariba.

Grewe’s remit at Vodafone includes data governance across all functions and all regions, as well as setting up and running SAP S/4 Hana for finance, supply chain and human resources (HR), SAP Concur travel booking and expenses, and logistics with enhanced warehouse management. He also has a focus on mergers and acquisitions integration and separation at a company that has a complex history of fusions and splits.

The digital transformation of the support functions, using SAP technology, at Vodafone started back in 2007, says Grewe. Here, “support functions” means HR, supply chain and finance.

“What is special at Vodafone is that we were able to have a core of standard processes across all our companies”

Holger Grewe, Vodafone

“We looked at it from the viewpoint that Vodafone acquires, integrates and also divests companies,” he says. “In the heyday of our mergers and acquisitions, we added a lot of companies that had grown on their own and set their own processes, systems and so on in the background. The key to the transformational agenda at that time was to get Vodafone working in the same way, wherever we were operating.”

Vodafone is a long-standing SAP customer, but that is not so special, says Grewe. “What is special at Vodafone is that we were able to have a core of standard processes across all our companies. There are others with lots of different SAP systems, but they run very different processes in each of these systems, whereas our target was really for the processes that we selected, that we arrived at a standardised model,” he says.

And now, with the implementation of S/4 Hana, the company has been brought to a new level, he says.

“The first step was really quite cumbersome, because going from market to market to do this takes quite some time. The first step took us four to five years. The S/4 step is about optimising the processes and also optimising the user experience,” says Grewe.

“It is also fair to say in the old [SAP] ECC world, we had this one, single-instance system, and it was very difficult to get the data out of the system and do the appropriate analysis. With S/4 now, we are really able to get the data and insight out much easier.”