IBM Services leads the way in helping clients accelerate modernization of enterprise systems, with more than 100 clients now live with SAP S/4HANA

ARMONK, New York, Dec. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has completed more than 100 successful SAP S/4HANA implementations that are enabling companies to speed up their digital reinventions.

As companies look to simplify increasingly complex business processes and upgrade their technology infrastructure, SAP S/4HANA allows companies to enable new capabilities not available before, helping them lay the foundation for easier adoption of innovative technology such as AI and blockchain.

Smart & Final Stores, a value-oriented food and everyday staples retailer, recently turned to IBM Services as the company set out to reinvent their operational business processes, beginning with modernizing their financial processes and systems. By adopting SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC), Smart & Final has created a financial backbone, a central digital platform which optimizes financial processes and harmonizes data centrally. Coupled with their e-commerce transformation,  these new capabilities will help the retailer gain a better understanding of their customers and deliver an enhanced in-store experience. Key to embarking on this journey was to adopt the right approach to SAP S/4HANA that helped ensure a continuous path to improved business performance, enhanced employee experience and operational efficiencies to support future growth.  

Clients across industries are opting for pre-configured industry solutions. Based on IBM research, pre-configured industry solutions have increased implementation speed up to 30 percent¹.  Drawing on its long term relationship with SAP and deep understanding of IT environments, IBM Services created pre-configured industry specific accelerators – IBM Impact Industry Solutions – designed to bring together and enhance existing IBM and SAP services to help accelerate SAP S/4HANA adoption. These solutions, combined with IBM's Impact Assessment, help companies increase quality and success in the change process.

"SAP S/4HANA can represent a significant shift in a company's entire business model, allowing them to transform processes, integrate new technology and quickly turn their focus on new market opportunities. The way companies implement the platform is critical and has a significant impact on their business down the road," said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Business Services.  "All clients have different starting points and requirements to drive their digital transformations. Having advised hundreds of clients and completed 100 transformations, our consultants bring this deep insight and knowledge to streamline transformation journeys and unlock the benefits for clients as quickly as possible."

With more than 100 transformations complete, IBM Services is guiding more than 200 leading global companies in their SAP S/4HANA implementations to help drive their digital transformation, including:

• Cleco, a regulated utility company, embarked on the intelligent enterprise journey leveraging SAP S/4HANA as a means to transform. IBM Services is helping Cleco to replace its core technology by shifting it from multiple systems to one primary system on SAP S/4HANA. This transformation, while improving the company's processes in nearly every area, is seeing real benefits in terms of speed of execution due to IBM's industry specific approach.
• Toyota Indus Motor Company, a manufacturer, assembler, distributor and importer of Toyota vehicles, spare parts and accessories in Pakistan, needed to compete with a surge of foreign entrants in the country's auto market. By transforming front-to-back operations with SAP S/4HANA on high-performance IBM POWER8 servers, its decisions were empowered with real-time data-driven tools to boost manufacturing efficiency.
• Logoplaste, a leading plastics packaging manufacturer, needed to implement a global business management tool that would bring its data into a single automated data platform across procurement, production and planning so that the company could take advantage of an IoT approach. IBM Services upgraded Logoplaste from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA quickly with no downtime for the manufacturing plants. The new approach gave the company the ability to provide real-time information to its supply-chain partners and paved the way for the digital innovation based on further SAP solutions.

"Successful Digital Transformations requires a strong business value case, and a well-defined technical roadmap that is closely aligned with the company's current and future strategy," said Michael Kleinemeier, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Digital Business Services. "The many successful SAP S/4HANA projects delivered by SAP and IBM are the great proof points, that our investments into business value assets help our joint clients to make the intelligent enterprise a reality. Aligning the SAP Model Company and IBM Impact Solutions accelerators are good examples of how the partnership delivers in-depth industry functionality, and at the same time accelerates time to value."

Together, IBM Services and SAP are helping to accelerate customers' digital transformations across many industries.  The partners continue to enhance their intelligent enterprise platform to deliver new insights and capabilities that speed innovation. Recently, IBM introduced an accelerated Bluefield migration approach that automates the process and conversion to provide a fast and flexible path to SAP S/4HANA transformation. In addition, IBM Impact Industry solutions are now available on multiple cloud environments, including IBM Cloud Private, and IBM is working closely with SAP to develop Industry Cloud solutions on IBM Cloud Private that can enable clients to securely tap into powerful technologies such as AI, Blockchain and others.

Client Quotes:

"Smart & Final is realizing operational efficiency and business capabilities to sustain our growth with SAP's S/4HANA digital core and IBM as our transformation partner," said Edward Wong, SVP CIO, Smart & Final. 

"A major part of our decision to move to SAP S/4HANA now factored on our review of the IBM IMPACT industry solutions," said Mark Northrup, General Manager and Chief Information Officer, Cleco. "From our analysis, the volume of pre-configured industry processes and accelerators has allowed us to jump start our implementation, show our stakeholders a working system on day one and will accelerate our overall time to value."

"SAP S/4HANA provides the enabling technology for our business strategy. We can understand how our processes are running, improve quality and reduce the amount of wastage. In the future, we can for instance demonstrate that bottles have passed clients' standards by showing them how we control the production process in real time, leading to faster delivery, better customer service and reduced costs," said Conceição Menezes, Chief Digital Officer at Logoplaste. "IBM Services is an essential partner for Logoplaste, delivering advanced SAP solutions that give us agility and flexibility. Finance, production and executive teams can harness new tools that will drive business operations into the future. Thanks to SAP and IBM, Logoplaste gains process transparency from shop-floor to top-floor that enable us to make better information-based decisions that we couldn't make before."

"We are now living in a world where consumers are better-informed than ever. We see that the best way to win sales and nurture loyalty is by building a reputation as the most trusted, highest-quality automotive brand in the market,"said Faizan Mustafa, CIO/Head of IT at Indus Motor Company Ltd. "SAP S/4HANA will become the nervous system that collects and analyzes data from across the business, and transforms that data into actionable insight. Our decision-makers will have up-to-the-minute information at their fingertips to make better-informed strategic decisions, improving the accuracy of our sales orders and delivering the highest level of customer service. Thanks to our IBM and SAP solutions, we are achieving the digital transformation that will help us strengthen our competitiveness in a fast-moving marketplace." 

About IBM
For more information about IBM Services, visit https://www.ibm.com/services.
For more information about IBM's SAP services, visit https://www.ibm.com/services/sap.

Sources:
[1] Based on analysis of project estimates and actuals by IBM's Impact Project Estimation Team

Media Contact:

Marisa Conway
IBM Media Relations
conwaym@us.ibm.com

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/95470/ibm_logo.jpg

Related Links

http://www.ibm.com

SOURCE IBM