Building an SAP S/4HANA Business Case for Automotive Components Manufacturer in USA
Overview
A powerful Business Case can become the life and soul of a Digital Transformation project. It brings strategies, processes and people to together and helps you understand the who, what, where, when and why of a transformation.
A huge Digital Transformation initiative like the SAP S/4HANA Migration brings a lot of technological and operational changes along with it. Not to mention, the humongous costs involved in terms of technology, processes and workforce enablement. Therefore, building a Business Case becomes not just critical but one of utmost importance.
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The Client
Founded in 1943, the client is an American automotive components original equipment manufacturer and an aftermarket ride control and emissions products manufacturer. They are one of the world’s largest pure-play powertrain companies serving OE markets worldwide with engineered solutions addressing fuel economy, power output, and criteria pollution requirements for gasoline, diesel and electrified powertrains.
Download the detailed Case Study
Business Situation and Challenges
In order to optimize and improve internal business processes, the client wanted to migrate to a modern integrated business platform, SAP S/4HANA.
- The customer was facing several process constraints with the antiquated SAP ECC system in place, which was highly inflexible in addressing their current business needs
- The automotive components manufacturer worked along with their system integrator to define the business case for the move to S/4HANA
- To build the best plan possible, they realized that a lot of insights on the “as-is” system was needed
- Estimates stated that it would take almost two months to complete their assessment and build a solid business case and roadmap
- The search was on for automation driven assessments to reduce the cost, time and effort required
Landscape Details
- SAP ECC 6.0 EHP 7
- 1.2 TB Oracle Database
- 1107 Active ERP users
- 18 Functional Modules
- 8800+ Custom Objects
- 141 Add ons
Solution provided by KTern
KTern was connected to the client’s sandbox system and an automated assessment was performed to illustrate technical, functional, and business process impact of moving from ECC to S/4HANA. They assessed their current SAP ECC system to determine the implications of the move to S/4HANA and the impact on current functionalities and associated system data.
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Automated Landscape Assessment gave a clear end-to-end KTern computed
Landscape and System Information in order to understand the ‘AS-IS’ and ‘TO-BE’
landscape architecture. The information covered in this section are as follows:
- System Information
- Add on Analytics
- Interfaces and Connections
- User Profiling
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Automated Business Process Assessment provided information on the
existing business processes used and the configurations for the same.
- Process Profiling
- Enterprise Structure Mining – Sales
- Enterprise Structure Mining – Purchase
- Enterprise Structure Mining – Orders
- Enterprise Structure Mining – Billing
- Simplification Item Check
- Fiori App Recommendations
- Business Function Analysis
- Training Scenario Recommendations
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Automated Custom Objects Assessment gave an analytical view of the custom
objects and programs present in the system
- Custom Object Profiler
- Enhancement Analysis
- Modification Analysis
- Custom Program Impact Analysis
- Business Transformation Assessment: Without a proper understanding of the landscape and the knowledge of how each of the processes is getting affected, it is literally impossible to build a proper digital transformation plan. KTern scanned the the existing landscape and provides the complete business process mapping at 6 levels. It starts from your Line of Business and goes all the way down to the granular Process Steps and KPIs
- In addition, after assessing the system, KTern also provided an automated roadmap and calculated the approximate amount of effort required for the migration to SAP S/4HANA.

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Apply NowKTern Driven Benefits
KTern performed the complete system assessment and therefore enabled the business leaders and key stakeholders to determine the impact and implications of the upcoming transformation. And, all this was done within a weeks’ time and in the most non-invasive way possible. Some of the benefits that the customer experienced were:
- 90% faster and automated assessment
- Custom Object Impact Analysis completed within 3 days
- Cost and effort savings due to reduced resource deployment
- Huge time savings due to elimination of configurations and manual work
- Improved collaboration and efficiency among all project stakeholders
Next Steps
You might also want to get a first-hand experience of the features of KTern. You can get started with the same at https://ktern.com/get-started. Alternatively, if you would like a guided demo of the product from one of our product engineers, kindly get in touch with us by submitting a message at https://ktern.com/company/contact.