Heavy engineering ERP: six plants, three countries, one SAP HANA system

Each plant that joined the group brought its own systems, its own data formats, and its own reporting rhythms. By the time the group had six production facilities across three countries, there was no single version of the truth at any level of the business.

Monthly management reporting required a dedicated team to extract, clean, and consolidate data from six different sources. The process took ten working days every month and still produced figures that did not always reconcile. Leadership decisions were made on data that was already a month old by the time it reached the boardroom.

Cross-plant procurement was impossible to optimize. Each site sourced independently, often buying the same components at different prices from the same supplier. The group was leaving significant cost savings on the table simply because no one could see the combined purchasing picture.

The group needed an enterprise platform that could handle the complexity of multi-country operations — different currencies, different tax regimes, different regulatory requirements — while giving leadership a single, live view of the entire business.

• Six incompatible legacy systems requiring manual extraction and reconciliation every reporting cycle
• Multi-currency operations with no automated consolidation, leading to FX errors in monthly reports
• Plant-level procurement with no group-wide supplier visibility, missing bulk discount opportunities
• Production capacity data locked at plant level, preventing group-wide order allocation decisions
• Three different regulatory environments requiring separate compliance tracking with no shared infrastructure

• SAP Production Planning. Group-wide capacity view enabling order allocation across plants in real time
• SAP Financial Consolidation. Multi-currency consolidation automated, with live FX conversion and intercompany elimination
• Central Procurement. Group purchasing contracts with vendor master shared across all six sites
• SAP Analytics Cloud. Executive dashboards updated in real time, replacing the 10-day monthly report cycle
• Compliance and Audit. Country-specific tax and regulatory configurations built in for all three operating jurisdictions

1. Blueprint and Architecture Design (Weeks 1–5). We conducted a detailed process blueprint across all six plants, mapped group-wide data requirements, and designed the SAP HANA architecture including country-specific configuration requirements for tax, currency, and regulatory compliance.
2. Core Build and Country Configuration (Weeks 6–14). Core financial and procurement modules were built on the shared instance. Country-specific configuration was layered for each operating jurisdiction. Master data — vendors, customers, materials — was cleansed and migrated.
3. Plant-by-Plant Integration and Testing (Weeks 15–22). Each plant connected to the central instance in sequence. Integration testing verified that production, inventory, and financial data flowed correctly between each site and the consolidated group layer.
4. Cutover, Stabilisation, and Handover (Weeks 23–28). All sites moved to SAP HANA as the primary system. Analytics Cloud dashboards were configured for the leadership team. A 60-day hypercare program provided dedicated support during the stabilisation period with on-call consultants in each time zone.