How a health tech major became a data-driven enterprise

Data migration to S/4 HANA and native HANA reporting enabled cost savings of $4.5 million per year

Client background

Client: A multinational technology company

Products/Services: Electronics, medical equipment

Area of operation: Global

Challenges

The client’s business data was spread across multiple regions with each region having a different way of storing and reporting data. The client wanted to enable a single source of truth by consolidating its data and standardizing its data management processes.

The current data landscape included 49 ERP kernels (data silos) residing across the globe in non-standard formats. The need was a re-usable and scalable ERP system compliant to latest standards, which could support reporting and tracking. To enable this, the client wanted to consolidate business data from all geographies into eight kernels and migrate data from the legacy SAP system to S/4 HANA system.

Solution

O2 Technologies and the client worked together to build a strong competency centre to enable migration of data and native HANA reporting to support global deployments. For efficient deployment, many countries were merged under certain geographies, for instance – NLATAM was Peru, Costa Rica, and Columbia.

Solution highlights:

Used an Advanced Data Migration (ADM) tool to extract, profile, map, transform and validate the data for loading into S/4 HANA
Built an aggregation layer for business reporting using native HANA to support global deployments
Enabled parallel execution of migration jobs with data migration factory framework
Created a phased approach to migrate geography-wise data in multiple deployment regions spread across two centralized data servers to manage data for two lines of business
Standardized data cleansing and reporting process, and enabled automated report generation, weeding out any discrepancy during development

Business impact

O2 Technologies efficiently orchestrated data migration from the disparate legacy systems to the centralized system for the client and delivered the project seamlessly with savings of 3300 person-weeks of effort by leveraging cross teams for deployment. The consolidation and standardization of data led to increased productivity and operational efficiencies.

Savings of $4.5 million per year due to the 5% productivity gain achieved with report standardization, products and group allocations
Decrease in the client’s time to market from 8 months to 3 months due to the reusable and customizable ADM tool leveraged by O2 Technologies
Faster workflows due to consolidation of data from 49 SAP kernels into 6 SAP kernels. It is targeted to be further consolidated to 2 SAP kernels
Better analytics, reporting and decision-making with standardized data formats and processes across the organization
Improvement in data governance due to a common framework for deploying data in various markets and use of single platform for data visualization
Shorter time to insights due to de-duped and standardized master data

This was a large data migration program to accelerate data management across many geographies through a simplified and faster time to market solution. This enhanced clarity on data helped in rapid onboarding of new geos and new acquired entities.