ISO supports BayWa's international expansion with more effective data governance processes on their S/4HANA system

Initial situation

Since its inception in Munich in 1923, BayWa has focused on the elementary basic needs of people: Food, heat, housing and mobility. BayWa is one of the leading international suppliers of agricultural raw materials and promotes energy efficiency and healthy living in the construction sector. It generates more than half of its annual earnings from the global expansion of renewable energies. Rund 21.500 Menschen sind in rund 50 Ländern für die BayWa im Einsatz. In 2021, the company was selected by the United Nations as one of "50 Sustainability and Climate Leaders" worldwide. Some adjustments were necessary due to the change from the previous SAP ERP ECC6 system to SAP S/4HANA. Within the scope of the previous ERP solution, BayWa previously used data quality tools from other providers and in-house developments. To this end, BayWa had added some enhancements to the data governance process. However, a solution that had developed over the years could not be migrated to S/4HANA, which is why BayWa sought a renowned SAP data quality specialist for a fully comprehensive solution from a single source. BayWa had found this specialist in ISO Professional Services GmbH.
 

Task

As a result of its rapidly expanding business in international markets, BayWa felt compelled to push ahead more strongly with digitization within the BayWa Group. The goal was to develop effective processes within the framework of a global software suite. For this reason, BayWa opted for S/4HANA, since SAP will discontinue support for its older ERP systems in the coming years.   How should the changeover from the heavily modified SAP ERP ECC6 system occur as smoothly as possible?

At the DSAG Kongress, and because of the BeDirect referral, BayWa AG came across the SAP specialist ISO Professional Services GmbH. Over the past 20 years, ISO has made a name for itself at an international level in data governance. After initial exploratory talks in 2020, BayWa selected ISO. The professional consulting sessions and the comprehensive solutions from one source as well as the high technical maturity and fast availability of the ISO tools tipped the scales in their favor. As part of the migration, BayWa decided to expand its data governance process to include the ISO products: Duplicate Check tools, Address Validation, VAT-ID Check, Content Enrichment, and the Structure Browser.

In doing so, BayWa wanted to establish more efficient, faster, and secure business processes, while at the same time creating a portal for recording master data requests from business partners for employees throughout the BayWa Group.
 

Project

The first project milestone was to build a lean prototype as quickly as possible. ISO Professional Services benefited from its best-practice approach, after successfully completing numerous projects in recent years. Based on this early technical delivery, ISO's SAP consultants were able to quickly address BayWa's various individual requirements.

The other project milestones were:

• Define target processes with the customer
• Perform integration tests
• Train key users at the customer
• Go Live

However, during a project, other items usually come up that customers need changing. This was also the case with the BayWa project. The software products used had to be expanded and customized, which took time.

After about a year, the ISO Professional Services team successfully completed the project. The implementation was challenging in that the S/4HANA environment is still very dynamic because SAP’s new vendor software releases force constant adjustments, but the project team managed these well.
 

Outcome

The migration has created a homogeneous system landscape for the data governance process at BayWa. Now there is one superior system for the entire BayWa Group. If one employee in a company makes a change, it affects everyone else. For this very reason, it was an essential prerequisite to set up a clean data governance process that would allow for maximum security as well as maintaining the accuracy of the data and the most recent data.

This process, however, was first rolled out to the smaller Group subsidiaries to test it with a comparatively small volume of data. Once this phase has been successfully completed, the remaining companies in the Group will gradually be added with increasing data volumes.

Key to the success was the trust-based collaboration between the ISO Professional Services SAP consultants and BayWa's migration team. Last year, as the Covid-19 situation temporarily eased, personal contacts were again possible, which contributed to the good business relationship. Later, the work was continued remotely accordingly.
 

Outlook

Although the core project has been completed, the work is not yet fully finished. This includes various customization requests from the customer regarding the data governance process for the business partner in SAP. This will involve optimizing the tools, automating them to a large extent, and then rolling them out throughout BayWa AG. For this purpose, the customer has placed a follow-up order for the new ISO tool Marlin Automatization Engine (MAE).  Further follow-up support from ISO is already planned for this process. The team is looking forward to further cooperation with BayWa AG.

 

Customer

BayWa AG

 

Industries

1. Energy

2. Agriculture

3. Construction

 

Geography

Headquarters in Munich + subsidiary companies worldwide

 

Implementation environment

SAP S/4HANA

 

ISO Solutions

Marlin Data Governance – Business Partner

Marlin Duplicate Check

Marlin Address Validation

Marlin VAT ID Check

Marlin Structure Browser

Marlin Content

 

Advantages

• SAP-integrated and scalable solutions
• Available for SAP ERP und S/4HANA
• Sophisticated Product Suite
• Clear architecture of the Marlin product world
• Short introduction time of the add-ons
• Efficient and effective business processes
• Through better data quality
• Increased data quality and security

 

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