Nobia Kitchens
Swedish owned Nobia is Europe’s leading kitchen specialist with some fifteen strong brands within the group. The operation consists of developing, manufacturing and sales of kitchen solutions across the Nordics, central Europe and the UK. Every week, Nobia manufacture more than 140,000 cabinets and meet more than 60,000 consumers in stores. Nobia has approximately 6,300 employees and net sales of about SEK 13 billion.
S/4HANA Implementation
The scope of this project was a greenfield implementation of S/4HANA to move the business systems on to the next generation SAP solutions, removing business risks from old legacy systems and the soon to be sun-setted ECC environment. These issues will be at the top of the agenda for many CIO’s as SAP have communicated the constraint of development of their ECC environment and set a 2025 deadline for support, all spend and resources will focus on S/4 as it is the future.
The business requirements were to enable order capture via legacy systems for phase 1 and for this to flow into the S/4 environment via SAP PO and post back confirmation to the commercial teams as required of order status. The data collected by PO was transferred via standard SAP process transactions that are triggered via SD/MM/EWM/FICO.
On-Premise Migration to SAP Solution
The migration roadmap was to start with creating an AWS sandbox environment for the functional teams to gain insight and familiarisation to the S/4HANA solution prior to “fit-gap” workshops. On-premise infrastructure and software was the preferred choice in this instance. Functional areas were Finance (FICO), Warehouse (EWM), Procurement (MM), Sales (SD) and Interface to Legacy (PO).
Once the requirements and ‘fit-gap’ workshops had been completed work began, utilising Agile coupled with SAP Activate best practice methodology, in three areas :
- Configuration
- Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP)
- Process Orchestration (PO)
These streams along with the data migration are the critical path to both Integration testing and User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
The data migration was not without its hurdles explains Trevor Barrett the Competence Manager:
“Due to the nature of S/4HANA there was a new challenge in the data transformation stream with the legacy ‘LSMW’ tool being superseded by next generation SAP migration tools (LSMW is still present but not considered as the S/4 migration tool) which gave another learning opportunity.
Whilst the new environment brought some new challenges and learnings the respective teams embraced theses working through the phases of the project, gaining confidence in the solution.”
The teams utilised the excellent SAP support joining a number of SAP S/4HANA training sessions and accessed the SAP education portal for online courses to also fully understand and prepare for the next generation environment.
Resource Technology Talent
Trevor turned to Next Ventures for resourcing support on this crucial first phase.
“I engaged Next ventures to leverage their reach within the SAP resource pool to attract and supply both resources that had S/4 experience or had a real drive to move into a business that was ahead of the curve and was driving the roll out of SAP S/4 to deliver business benefits across the group as part of the long term strategy. Next Ventures provided expert SAP consultants to support the finance and logistics teams across the full life-cycle of the project.”
Successful First Phase Implementation
This first phase implementation to some of the key brands within the Nobia group went live February 19 and is already returning strong business performance benefits. The roadmap is in place for the continued roll out across the entire group over the coming months. All of the Next Venture’s consultants extended and completed their contracts in line with the project implementation plan.
Next Ventures has a dedicated global SAP Practice focused solely on resourcing SAP talent on a permanent or contingent basis. We support SAP implementations, globally, and across multiple industries. We are a trusted partner to many Fortune 500 enterprises, vendors and consultancies.
