BBRZ: Successful S/4HANA Conversion

The BBRZ Group helps 100,000 people enter the workforce each year. 3,500 employees across 135 locations provide this support for entering the job market. An organization of this size requires a high-performance ERP system. In collaboration with INFORMATICS, the system was migrated to S/4HANA.

In addition, the BBRZ Group runs social enterprises for people with disabilities who work in restaurants or manufacturing facilities, and operates CODERS.BAY at the Tabakfabrik in Linz, where SAP courses are also taught.

It is also SAP that has been ensuring “efficient, high-performance, and streamlined back-end administration” within the group for years, as BBRZ Managing Director Dr. Christoph Jungwirth reports. Going forward, S/4HANA will ensure this high level of service quality. The migration was successfully completed in recent months in collaboration with INFORMATICS. Just how complex this is can be seen from one fact: “Our financial accounting department handles 70,000 incoming invoices annually.”

Dr. Christoph Jungwirth, Managing Director of BBRZ

PURE TECHNICAL CONVERSION

The mandate for INFORMATICS was clear: “To migrate the system to S/4HANA as a purely technical conversion without implementing any concurrent process or organizational changes,” said INFORMATICS project manager Christoph Gerbel.

BBRZ IT Director Dieter Lamb praises the thorough preparation. “The early migration to S/4HANA not only provided us with long-term investment security, but also allowed us to reduce our complex system landscape from five to two systems, in addition to improving performance.”

The conversion took 18 months. The INFORMATICS project team had a great deal of expertise in organization and accounting. “This made it possible to achieve some quick wins during the project. We were able to streamline the payment process with the banks and, using Fiori, implement a simple, management-friendly way of presenting data in reports,” said Elisabeth Steinbach, SAP Consultant at INFORMATICS.

QUICK WINS PAVED THE WAY

Lamb also reports on quick wins for FAB’s production facilities, such as “significantly faster monthly closings—reducing the time required from hours to minutes.” Outsourcing SAP Basis operations to an external data center at eww ITandTEL improved operational reliability.

The project was completed on time and within budget. “We have never regretted our decision, and the collaboration was exemplary,” says Dr. Miriam Eder, Head of Controlling, Audit, and Compliance at the BBRZ Group, summing up the experience.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO OF THE SUCCESS STORY HERE