Case Study 1: Overcoming Challenges for an FTSE Oil and Gas Company

Issue 

Our technical team conducted various workshops to gather the specific requirements from key stakeholders and business teams. Through this exercise, they identified that the templates for ANZ region were not compatible for the client’s EMEIA based teams. 

Solution 

The proposed solution was a huge migration project; designing and deploying SAP Ariba CI9 middleware and mapping this to updated third party business tools.  

The migration of legacy SAP systems to SAP Ariba cloud platform provides access to all information and data from one centralised platform for their offices around the world, each with country-specific invoicing templates.  

As a result, this transformation will significantly reduce manual intervention and minimise the financial risk and delay of payments. 
 

Overcoming challenges 

Our consultants had to widen their understanding of the organisation’s internal business processes and product knowledge including non-SAP business systems, as these were mapped to the existing legacy SAP services. 

During the first phase of implementation, several technical issues were identified: 

• Service entry sheets and invoices were generating interface errors with backend connectivity generating latency issues 
• During UAT, testing the interface met the expected test results, but during the Go Live phase, the exception was passively generated. 

Our technical team worked with various simulated cases to test and recreate the exception, and then managed to deploy a patch to resolve the issue. 

The SAP Ariba implementation project was a success – and the client has reported significant improvements to their overall procurement cycle time, across all teams. 

They have also experienced faster supplier payments and invoicing with an automated workflow.