SAP S/4Finance Transformation at Schönmackers

6th March 2020

Located in Kempen on the lower Rhine, Schönmackers is one of the technology and system leaders of NRW’s recycling economy.

Schönmackers operates an SAP system for the areas human resources, material management, shop floor, financial accounting, asset management and controlling. In the medium term, Schönmackers is planning to implement the SAP add-on Waste & Recycling for the mapping of their merchandise management and operative processes.

In March 2019, Schönmackers entrusted consenso with the technical conversion of the existing SAP ERP systems for all areas to the new SAP S/4HANA solution. For this reason, consenso put together a team of four employees, who – in part-time, depending on their respective tasks in the project – implemented the S/4HANA conversion together with Schönmackers’ IT and business departments within a total duration of 8 months.

Prior to the conversion to S/4HANA, Schönmackers moved to a new operation system and an SAP HANA database located at a provider in Berlin.

Working together, Schönmackers and consenso decided to follow the so-called “brown field” approach in order to be able to implement the conversion from ERP to S/4HANA as quickly as possible.

As one of the innovations, at the beginning of the project, consenso introduced SAP’s business partner concept (CVI) at Schönmackers. In the first step, all relevant programs and interfaces, that needed to be adjusted in regard to S/4HANA compatibility, were identified in order to ensure that all developments used by Schönmackers would run smoothly on the new S/4HANA system.

In a sandbox system (project system copied from the productive system), the identified objects were examined with consenso’s Readiness Check. The resulting list was grouped by priority of the coding sections to be adjusted and worked through afterwards. Furthermore, many batch input processes were replaced by new S/4HANA functions. The adjustment of the development objects in the sandbox system could be implemented within the shortest time – also due to consenso’s experiences from the Readiness Check as well as S/4HANA conversions for other customers.

In August, the first test conversion took place on the project system, technically supported by the hosting provider and followed by the functional test performed by Schönmackers’ business departments. Following this first migration, the further necessary adjustments could be implemented in the new S/4 system.

In October and November, the development and quality assurance system could be converted, both also copies of the productive system. Both conversions were successful and faultless and took between 6 and 9 hours each.

On the go-live weekend at the end of November / beginning of December, all transaction data and balances were converted within 5 hours; the following technical review resulted in the production release and conclusion of the successful transformation on Sunday, 01^st December at 5 pm. All development objects adjusted in the project have been running smoothly and faultlessly until today in the new SAP S/4HANA environment.

Photo: Schönmackers Umweltdienste | https://www.schoenmackers.de/