Interview: Successful S/4HANA Greenfield implementation at Trelleborg Sealing Solutions

Mr Rasinski, could you please look back to the beginning of the project and tell us about the project in terms of its scope and major milestones. What have we achieved?

Mariusz Rasinski: Our company has successfully transitioned from an outdated ERP system to a modern one, enhancing transparency and operational visibility across our various departments, which had previously been lacking. This was the pivotal element of this initiative.

For our comprehensive pilot project, we chose to implement it within key locations: a customer solutions centre in Paris, a warehouse in Normandy and a manufacturing unit in Denmark, focusing primarily on the aerospace sector. These sites were integrated with other segments, necessitating certain interfaces. The pilot successfully went live from a systems standpoint in July 2021.

The pilot project confirmed that our new template was effective and mirrored our operational reality. It also provided valuable insights into potential challenges we might face during the full organisational rollout. Following this, we launched simultaneous implementation across our European customer solution centres and selected warehouses on 1 November 2023, marking our most recent go-live event. This marked a significant phase, engaging all European customer solution centres that were part of the legacy system as well as our supply chain management organisation. Additionally, we established connectivity with our central warehouse. Drawing on the experience gained from the pilot and the dedicated efforts of our team, we achieved a successful launch and managed to be fully operational from day one, avoiding any significant setbacks.

What were the main criteria for choosing PwC Germany as an implementation partner for such a large-scale project?

Alexander Jarosch: We undertook a clear, detailed and professional request-for-proposal (RFP) and request-for-quotation (RFQ) process with various vendors and had meetings with all of them, based on a very comprehensive description of our project requirements, expectations and so forth. Going through that process with various potential vendors, the one that really stood out was PwC.

In the very first meeting, we immediately had the feeling that we had already known each other for a long time, even though we had only just met.

Martin, what was special about this S/4HANA greenfield project for us as the implementation partner?

Martin Paul: You don’t very often have the chance to start a project from the very beginning; not only in terms of the system setup, but also in terms of defining the organisation of the project, which needs to be done together with the client, including governance of the project and all the roles which are required, such as the users and the business process owners. In this project, we really had the chance to do all of that together in a true partnership with the client, and delivered the whole project right to the very end. I think this is quite unique. It’s also really important to emphasise that Trelleborg Sealing Solutions didn’t just want bits and pieces of a transformation: we were together from beginning to end, which was very special. On projects like this, you can really learn from each other and take away a lot compared to short-term engagements. You really grow together.

Mariusz, could you give us some insights into the collaboration model on this project?

Rasinski: Almost the whole organisation was involved in this project. Each area, each site, each country was involved, and that was reflected in the project structure.

There was a steering committee consisting of our executives. But we also had a change advisory board that represented all the different areas of our organisation in Europe. Their role was to ensure that the decisions which we were making and the processes that we were setting up were in line with their expectations and how they were running the business. Then we divided ourselves into streams reflecting the different areas: Sales, Procurement, Production, Planning, Finance, Controlling and Logistics. In each area, we had process owners from the business, as well as our process engineers and technical experts from IT. Within IT, we always had a combined team; each person from Trelleborg Sealing Solutions had a counterpart from PwC. Then, most importantly, we involved all the countries that were within the scope of our go-live, and people from different areas. We made sure to involve the subject-matter experts from the business in defining templates. Throughout the ERP replacement phase, key users from across the company joined, ensuring representation from all countries involved.

Looking back, what do you think were the major challenges on this project? And how did you overcome them together?

Paul: Obviously there are many challenges which you need to tackle on projects like this. There were technical challenges that we had to overcome – for example, challenges related to connecting to legacy systems, which were quite old in some areas, and there were challenges related to the transition required from the old world to the new.

You could go with a big bang approach, but it is quite risky in a greenfield programme like this. You could follow a traditional rollout scenario, but then you require a transition period where your business will need to work in parallel in the old and the new systems. As we did not want to end up with a lengthy rollout over several years, we ultimately tried to find the right compromise between a rollout and a big bang scenario. So, that was a challenge.

Rasinski: I agree on this technical challenge. The interface to our current dedicated warehouse management system was one of the biggest challenges which impacted the overall project in a really significant way. Since we had to operate with that warehouse, we were not able to technically split into a rollout mode. We had to keep the connection to the legacy system while at the same time connecting it to SAP. This meant we had to decide to go for the big bang.

Paul: Additionally, we shouldn’t forget that this was a project with many human beings who you must guide, of course. A large group of people needs your attention. I think what made it special is that we formed a relatively small group of people (Alex, Mariusz and myself) from the very beginning and basically took all the decisions in this small group. We weren’t just distributing it to several experts and then waiting to see what would happen. We were sitting together, looking at expert advice, and then making decisions on how we were going to run it. I’m not saying that every decision we made was right, but the most important decisions were.

Jarosch: In my opinion, the most critical part of this endeavour was our complexity.

We had to meet all those requirements in our first shot. A lot of effort had to go into cross-stream alignment, to define processes end-to-end.

Rasinski: This leads to another very important point, which is scope control. This is crucial if you want to be successful with any ERP system. There are two reasons why you need to control the scope. First, some of the requirements which users might raise will be based on the current system and processes which have evolved over decades. You need to park them and check if they are still relevant, and whether they are something that is still needed. The second reason why you should control your scope is that delivering more means more complexity, as well as more time and effort. That would have been unrealistic for us, as the scope of our project with the scale of operations we were covering was already massive.

But we all learned from the pilot, and it taught us that we needed to take this seriously. We also saw that we were successful in the end, with more system functionality after implementation.

Why was change management such a crucial part of this transformation and how did it contribute to the project’s success?

Jarosch: After going through the phases of designing the new processes with a limited number of key users, setting up the systems according to that blueprint, cleansing the data and migrating it into the new system, the last critical part left was to prepare a huge number of users to be released into this new system. It was very clear to us – in particular, after the experience we had gained from the pilot – that preparing the end users for this journey was the final and probably most crucial puzzle piece for the success of this project. Once the users started being released into the new system, of course there was a somewhat controlled ramp-up of transactions in the new system, but you very quickly reach a point of no return, where going back to the old system due to major problems in the new setup wouldn’t be possible any more. So whatever happens and whatever goes wrong, it has to be fixed in the new environment. You really want to make sure that the problems which do occur are kept at a manageable level and you don’t end up in a disaster. This can only be mitigated by preparing the user base for that new reality in the best possible way.

What’s the plan for the future?

Jarosch: Our latest go-live in 2023 was our most significant and complex milestone, but it is not the end of the project. It was a very important step and change for the organisation. We now will continue with the rollout to the remaining sites.

What are your personal takeaways from this successful implementation?

Rasinski: The key areas are communication and people.

When implementing an ERP system, remember that technology accounts for only 20%, while people make up 80%. You need to support people and help them feel comfortable so that they will succeed in operating on the new system with new processes from day one. They have years of experience, and that element is the most crucial and the most important.

And what is the other takeaway? My opinion about consultants. I mean, I had worked with consultants before, and worked with some good ones who were engaged, really involved and collaborative. But frequently you have consultants who just advise and throw in ideas without looking at the practicalities.

I am truly pleased with the partnership we experienced. Our collaboration revealed that my initial perception was mistaken. We were really working together, respecting each other and collaborating well. Indeed, we functioned as a unified team.

Jarosch: We made it! Right from the beginning of this programme, we knew that it was going to be a real challenge, for us in IT, but even more so for our business. Moving off a legacy ERP system that had evolved over 20+ years with a lot of bells and whistles which had been added to it over time, going back to a white sheet of paper and starting over again from scratch in a modern ERP system wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. Therefore, it was crucial that we engaged with all relevant stakeholders to find the right compromise in managing the scope of the project on a reasonable level without hampering overall business performance and processes. Forming the right team of business representatives, business process engineers, internal IT staff (who were mainly dealing with our legacy applications up until then) and external consultants eventually made up the right formula for our success. For us it was also very important to take over leadership of the programme at the right time, when we transformed our legacy-centric internal IT organisation into a SAP S/4HANA centric IT organisation, taking over control of the programme from our PwC consultants and making them coaches instead. At the end of the day, the consultants will leave, and we need to stand on our own two feet, which is what we are doing now.

Paul: Having the right people in crucial positions is key to being successful in these very complex programmes. This is relevant no matter if you look at internal or external positions.

If you are not certain about that with the people in your team, sit down together as long as necessary to align, or go for a replacement. There is no chance that you will be successful with any compromise on that.

Another thing is partnering with your client and within the teams to ensure that if challenges or issues occur, you get to work on a solution immediately instead of debating for ages about whose fault it was. Do not get me wrong, you need to check what caused an issue to prevent it happening again, but in programmes like this it must be a second priority, as a solution to the problem must always come first. This way, you’ll enable a team culture where no one tries to hide an issue in the first place just to avoid feeling guilty about it. You need to allow failures, otherwise you will not make it to the very end.

Finally, you need to find a client who wants to work with you in such a trusting partnership, otherwise the key takeaways mentioned above could not have been achieved.