Established in 2002, Enowa is a global midsize SAP partner with a dedicated focus on business process and SAP consulting. Enowa’s nearly 20-year foundation started in the chemical industry, supporting business process optimization and SAP engagements delivered with functional and technical experts, driving value in small teams for our mutual clients.
Enowa is active in the chemical industry, leading multiple business and SAP S/4HANA transformations as well as sponsoring the recent ASUG Best Practices for Chemicals event. During this event, Enowa’s client, Jayhawk Chemical, spoke about its five-month SAP S/4HANA business transformation, and Lubrizol shared how Celonis was leveraged to support its SAP S/4HANA journey.
With deep industry knowledge and a commitment to value realization, the SAP partner ecosystem is critical to the success of the chemical industry. SAP partners help customers of all sizes in countries worldwide take advantage of SAP’s innovative solutions, simplify their business processes, and orchestrate the Intelligent Enterprise. To bring this perspective to the SAP community in the chemical industry, we are continuing with the second edition of the Chemical Industry Partner Stage series.
Here, we talk with Rick Place, partner and vice president of Marketing and Client Development at Enowa Consulting.
Q: When you talk to chemical customers, what excites you about the industry?
A: The chemical industry is SAP’s foundation; it is the base of why SAP ERP came to life. Similarly, Enowa started with most of its clients in the chemical industry, and now its client base spans across all sectors of manufacturing (mill to food, repetitive to discrete) and other industry sectors.
Our excitement of and alignment with the SAP community in the chemical industry is firmly rooted in our start. I think, like everyone, we get excited when we talk about our roots. The roots establish the tenure of our experts. We have SAP configurations that are more than 20 years old deployed at various divisions of companies that have been bought and sold for decades – and Enowa’s configuration footprint is still running at those clients!
What excites me is the drive for efficiency and change. In 2021, we expect to see many mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and spin-offs. These transactions are always prevalent in the chemical space, but the frequency is increasing and the speed requirements to complete these projects increases for shorter timelines. This results in a landscape complexity reduction in the divesting company and a lower cost of TSA for the acquiring entity. We are excited because our competence in both scenarios is our core.
In addition, over the more than 20 years I’ve been leading Enowa’s alignment for new projects, I’ve been able to lean heavily on our successful delivery team. I cannot think of a better compliment than trust and partnership between Enowa and our clients. In sum, trust is what excites me to make a difference every day with clients.
Looking forward into 2021, what do you see as the top priorities for chemical customers?
Speed. We see two needs for speed. The first is with clients who need real data in real time, or close to it. They are calling on Enowa experts to drive transformation projects both in SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA landscapes. Most commonly, we are driving results on these topics:
- Financial optimization projects leveraging group reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud for planning
- Analytics based on having data governance and data accessibility to visualize and analyze data
- Reviewing process execution with Celonis
- SAP S/4HANA transformations through a mutually agreed upon approach:
- Selective data transition to limit business disruption and leverage existing parts while leaving behind undesired areas
- Greenfield to move away from years of unnecessary customization
- Brownfield to leverage previous releases in good condition
The second need for speed is around mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, largely driven by private equity. For these clients, our consultants run these complex projects. They will expect a fully functioning system in short order.
Overall, the chemical industry is continuing to leverage advancing technologies. We see more activity around these topics:
- Process excellence such as rapid financial closing; refined and optimized planning and scenario-based planning; shop floor integration with SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence; and customer experience focused on enabling sales teams with SAP Sales Cloud and backend customer satisfaction with SAP Commerce Cloud
- Digitalization such as supply chain integration of data from shop floor, lab, and sales with actionable insights; and robotic process analysis (RPA) analysis, assessment, and results projection, leveraging available RPA technology
How has digital enabled these priorities from your perspective?
We no longer only talk to IT about business system transformation. We talk to the business in their terms so they can understand how SAP products improve productivity for their department. In the chemical industry, we do not see wide corporate adoption of digital transformation, but adoption in pointed areas. For instance, our Connect Lab combines real-time data with actionable insights to keep products moving, with temperature range and with notification of any supply chain disruptions.
We had a chance to hear about Enowa’s SAP S/4HANA implementation at Jayhawk Fine Chemical Corporation during various ASUG events. At Jayhawk, SAP S/4HANA was deployed in five months. What made this project successful?
The foundation is always the excitement for change. Enowa’s business process experts were able to demonstrate foundational changes that would help every department drive efficiency, and now fast forward to the past year where every person is essential and process efficiency is key. Once we established the C-suite’s commitment to change, we kept them visible while navigating around the other departments, from finance, to production, to warehouse, and to customer service.
The ability for our experts to create excitement about change is key. Jayhawk’s team was as equally committed and motivated as we were, which is the key for accomplishing a project together. We always explain this to clients: The software works, but we cannot just do this project to you, we need to do it with you.
When we talk to customers, big or small, change management is a key pillar of digital transformation. How are companies embracing these changes and equipping their teams for success?
I see two things here. Readiness and change management.
Our clients understand that SAP S/4HANA works; the end-to-end technology supports the majority of business processes, especially in the chemical industry. What is often confused is the business changes necessary in a readiness phase. These include the story build, the vision, and many benefit statements needed to bring the business into a lead or co-lead position for foundational change. Given Enowa’s business consulting experts, we build the storyboard to ensure the business drives projects and participates in key decisions. Simultaneously, Enowa is working with IT to build the platform, including systems, applications, and technology components as preparation for a successful adoption of SAP S/4HANA.
Recently, organizational change management is a regular topic. In the past, Enowa had always executed a “train the trainer” approach via our consultants who performed the project and were most intimate with configuration and supporting documentation. As change is now occurring with remote work and more disparate operations, we approach each client with a rich program to understand what it means to do their job after go-live. These programs contain knowledge portals for managing and tracking training, documentation, help guides, and other key elements. We also promote a non-live system that is close to what a productive solution would look like for larger programs, so users can touch and feel a system in a day-in-the-life scenario.
Enowa is a close partner to SAP and continues to execute successful projects. What advice can you offer to our chemical clients to enable success?
We have a few pillars of success, which have been recent changes to the current delivery capacity. These foundational delivery components, in a remote setting, can be leveraged by SAP clients as well.
- Execute in small teams. Only engage meeting or project participation with those that are critical. Wide project teams take longer to move and communication is more challenging.
- Look at the pieces of a process that are most complex and tackle them succinctly in small groups and consumable portions. Engage an internal or external expert to validate the overall process before digging in deeper.
- Encourage and equip every participant with good audio, visual, and remote working means.
- Spend the time and effort to build a robust training plan and execute it thoroughly.
How does Enowa create value for the chemical Industry and how can people connect with you?
Recognizing the Enowa logo is getting easier given the depth of our projects in the chemical industry. We are growing our activity in many areas of SAP, like chemical and other manufacturing industries such as food, consumer packaged goods, and pharmaceuticals.
While our logo appears up with the large system integrators, we are still intimate in what we do – our clients appreciate and realize having the right dedicated expert, not necessarily a whole swath of resources in a different country, is needed. When we deliver our projects with a smaller team of experts, communication is streamlined, clutter is lost, and the overall number of delivery hours is a fraction of when trying to execute with too many consultants.
As many of our clients will tell you, I am available when you need me, and this is true of our team. I’m routinely getting text messages from the executives at our clients and responding to calls and e-mails at all times of the day. We can be followed on social media, contacted through an expert on our website chat, called at 610-296-3640, or e-mailed at info@enowa.com.
Looking to stay connected with the chemical industry? Join the SAP Chemical Industry community on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter @SAPChemicals, and check out our SAP Community page.
SAP is a leader in the chemical industry and is committed to continuous innovation. We encourage you to collaborate with us and discuss how the SAP solution portfolio can enable the intelligent enterprise in the chemical industry.
Matthew Reymann is a chemicals solution specialist at SAP.
