The regional winners of the 2016 SAP Quality Awards, recognizing the best customer implementation projects across the Europe, Middle East and Africa region were announced yesterday at SAP headquarters in Germany.
The winners learned if they won gold, silver, and bronze at the regional award ceremony. Franck Cohen, president of Europe, Middle East & Africa at SAP, said the color of the medals is the best kept secret at SAP: “It is easier to break into Fort Knox than find out who has won the regional SAP Quality Awards.”
The SAP Quality Awards honor customers for their exceptionally successful SAP implementation projects, delivering real business value to their organizations on time and within or even under budget. The success of the winning projects is not a matter of luck, but of precise planning and execution.
A total of 258 customers nominated their successful projects, and 128 received a local bronze, silver, or gold Quality Award. All gold winners automatically qualified for the regional awards and 12 winners were selected in four categories: Business Transformation, Cloud Innovation, Fast Delivery, and SAP HANA Innovation by independent external judges to ensure objectivity.
The judges evaluated the proven business benefits these projects delivered to their organizations and based their decisions on how far the projects adhered to the 10 principles of quality, which include anchoring the business value firmly in the project and using organizational change management to transform the business. The quality of the projects was extremely high this year, making it particularly difficult for the judges to select the final winners.
Business Transformation Winners
Gold winners PJSC Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, supported by BDO Unicon, implemented SAP ERP on SAP HANA in 16 territorial banks with over 17.500 branches in Russia to transform their entire business support functions. The project centralized the expense management system, increasing cost transparency, removing all paper-based accounting processes and improving reporting speed by 300 times. One of the factors of the project’s success was the focus on user satisfaction. Regular surveys were used to determine user satisfaction before go-live and gamification was used to ensure adoption of the solution by the end users.
The City of Cape Town, silver award winner, together with SPPrac – SP Practice Consulting Services Pty Ltd, implemented SAP Project Portfolio Management to transform the way capital projects are managed, improving the long-term planning, selection, and execution. The project delivered real tangible financial results and significantly overachieved the planned business case. The judges were impressed by the well-structured execution, the robust governance and the focus on quality. City of Cape Town applied SAP Best Practices and minimized custom development. Where gaps were identified, business process changes were considered. To ensure strong user adoption, Innovation Champs were identified to share the corporate vision which also resulted in the breaking down of traditional silos in the organization.
Through strong project management and close collaboration with implementation partner Atos Serbia, Ahold Delhaize, international food retailer operating in 11 countries with over 375,000 employees and 6,500 stores, took home the bronze award for their implementation of SAP for Retail in Serbia. With the centralization and simplification of the system landscape and the use of templates, Ahold Delhaize Serbia has achieved better assortment and promotion management, an increase in sales and reduced the total cost of ownership.
Cloud Innovation Winners
With its HR hire to retire program, Tata Steel Europe won the gold award in the Cloud Innovation category. Capgemini UK supported the roll-out of the SAP SuccessFactors product suite for 18,500 blue and white collar workers in the UK and Netherlands. This included a critical Health and Safety report to track training and competencies in real time which aims to reduce the risk of injury to employees. Tata Steel Europe determined the strategic needs in a pre-project phase which included reference site visits to get a better understanding of best practices and avoid the pitfalls of their peers. With this knowledge, they firmly anchored business value into the project and could define both qualitative and financial KPIs, which could be tracked throughout. Employees and managers are already benefiting from the self-service functionality and mobile usage of SAP SuccessFactors solutions to complete HR tasks at a time and place to suit them. In addition, the recruiting process system has been optimized, decreasing the number of agency hires and improving the candidate experience. The user satisfaction rate for recruitment in the UK is currently at 93%. The implementation of SAP SuccessFactors solutions demonstrated to the judges how an HR tool modernized Tata Steel Europe’s organization.
Finland based HKScan Oy, the leading Nordic food company specializing in responsibly produced high-quality meat, processed meats and convenience food, wanted to renew its CRM processes, consolidate customer information, and reduce manual reporting. The company chose SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer to cover sales processes including new customer acquisition and customer and consumer services with the goal to increase sales, customer satisfaction and transparency of information. Moving to a cloud based solution was a strategic decision to lower the TCO. Implementation partner Bilot Consulting Oy recommended using the Agile development model. Process renewal and knowledge transfer to key users were started in an early phase of the project through process design and demos. The judges were especially impressed with the way the project team worked with the business to get alignment when the cloud solution deviated from the business requirements and rewarded HKScan with a silver SAP Quality Award.
Mediq B.V., a major player in global healthcare based in De Meern in the Netherlands, won the bronze award for the implementation of SAP SuccessFactors in four months to cover core HR processes and performance and goals management. The project was led by the HR function and supported by Deloitte with a clear focus on meeting the project goals and keeping the timeline. Mediq had a well-defined project governance model with regular steering committee meetings at short intervals to ensure a quick turnaround in decision making. The short- and long-term business benefits were well defined and mostly achieved in this first roll-out. Administrative HR tasks have been reduced and decision making has been improved with more information at managers’ fingertips. With the future integration of payroll and business intelligence, process optimization will continue.
SAP HANA Innovation Winners
Gold award winner EUROBANK ERGASIAS S.A. is a Greek banking group, active in 7 countries. Their winning project is the first banking sector SAP S/4HANA Finance implementation and replaces existing ERP and satellite systems. Eurobank wanted a single source of truth to reduce operational risk and increase financial control and efficiency. The project was completed under budget and was completely self-funded. This was possible as Eurobank not only used SAP standards and an SAP rapid-deployment solution to achieve faster implementation at lower cost but also due to excellent project planning and execution. “This project was done by the books,” as one judge said. The project has already realized impressive business benefits including fully automated end-of-day closing and processing, a dramatic reduction in cost centers and reduction in annual maintenance cost due to the retirement of the legacy systems.
SOCAR, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic, wins silver for the implementation of the first SAP Digital Upstream Operation Management solution in the world. Supported by SAP experts, SOCAR managed to automate all processes for collecting oil production data, ensuring that there was one central repository for all data to improve accuracy and enable standardized real-time reporting, eliminating duplicate reports and speeding up the production closing for oil and gas balances from 15 to 3 days.
The bronze award goes to German retailer Lidl Stiftung & Co. KG, one of Europe’s leading food retailers. Lidl is represented in 30 countries worldwide and operates around 10,000 stores, more than 140 distribution centers in currently 27 European countries and has around 215,000 employees. Lidl’s business model “best quality at the best possible price” also applies to their eLWIS project. Lidl implemented SAP for Retail powered by SAP HANA as part of the largest IT transformation in their history. The judges were impressed by the high speed of the first rollouts in Austria and Northern Ireland, which were achieved through high-quality planning, execution by a committed, international project team with efficient decision-making structures and thanks to the novel implementation methods for modeling the end-to-end processes used by their implementation partner KPS.
Fast Delivery Winners
The judges awarded the Ketraco (Kenya Electricity Transmission Company Ltd) Kipepeo project gold in recognition of the complexity of this project that was supported by INDRA Ltd. and moved the entire management of the electricity transmission infrastructure onto SAP. Ketraco already leveraged SAP Quality Assurance during the blueprint phase, which highlighted issues that could be solved before the project started, ensuring a successful implementation of SAP ERP on SAP HANA in seven months for 250 users. Business benefits achieved include better resource utilization and increased transparency. Ketraco uses SAP HANA Analytics most advanced capabilities to improve decision making and is now prepared to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, leading the adoption of SAP’s latest technology in the region and in the market.
Two-time gold award winner in MENA Al Nasser Trading and Import Company, the largest supplier for lighting and advance building control systems in the Middle East, received the regional silver award for its SAP ERP on HANA project, implemented by Isyx Technologies. As well as benefiting from previous experience, Al Nasser established a data management team to cleanse and restructure data before project start. The team took the decision to minimize data migration by putting all legacy data in an online portal. To ensure continuity in the project two team members were assigned to each module and team on-boarding and orientation sessions were held before each project phase. One aspect of the project management that was particularly innovative was that it was a paperless project. KPIs and dashboards were maintained through the project portal and all communication was done online ensuring transparency. With the project Al Nasser simplified processes and reduced stock levels to ensure a fast return on investment.
Bronze winner Bleistahl-Produktions GmbH & Co KG is engineering partner to the global automotive industry and has produced valve seat inserts and valve guides at its Headquarters in Wetter, Germany, since 1954. BLEISTAHL set up a project to replace a variety of legacy systems with an integrated SAP Financials, SAP Sales & Distribution, and SAP Warehouse Management system with EDI connections to its customers. After several setbacks in previous projects the team realized that people are the key to the success of a project together with a robust change management approach to change historically grown structures and processes. To increase trust in the new system, the team had an in-house SAP exhibition and used permanent prototyping with iterative end-user trainings to monitor the project status. BLEISTAHL achieved their business case to reduce costs by sunsetting their legacy systems and a zero error strategy for their in and outbound EDI processes. The SAP project, which was supported by itelligence AG, will be enhanced with several logistics components in a future step.
Congratulations to all local and regional SAP Quality Award winners and their partners for their outstanding implementation projects..
In 2017 the SAP Quality Awards program will be launched for the first time in North America. If you are interested in applying for an award in Europe, Middle East and Africa or North America click on the link to our SAP Quality Awards website for more information, on the categories, eligibility criteria and submission timeline.
