Global cloud project secures award in the “Innovation Lighthouse Award” category
Finland-based chemical company Kemira (5,000 employees with annual sales of €3.6 billion with 63 production sites and sales in over 100 countries) has successfully completed its transition to a new digital future platform in the cloud. Not only has the company fully digitized its existing SAP ERP infrastructure and relocated it to the SAP S/4HANA private cloud, but it has also established a complete global process and system landscape based on the SAP Intelligent Enterprise architecture. The cbs team led by Henning Krug secured the Innovation Award 2023 in the “Innovation Lighthouse Award” category for this project success.
Aptly named LEAP, the transformation project represented a quantum leap into the digital future for the company, and involved all business processes, divisions, and legal units of the international Kemira organization. A total of 60 systems were moved to the cloud. The project required the parallel implementation of five closely aligned initiatives: SAP S/4HANA transformation, a redesign of financial accounting, implementation of the SAP Datasphere as an enterprise data warehouse, a digital data excellence initiative, and the complete migration of 360 on-premise interfaces to SAP Integration Suite.
According to Taras Podbereznyj, Kemira CIO responsible for the innovation project; “The new company-wide solution combined with innovations and a solid global foundation for enterprise operations gives us opportunities to use data-driven business models in the cloud, improve our customer relationship and focus on sustainability. Kemira is thus leading the way with a new generation of enterprise solutions and pioneering a full-scale cloudification of SAP business architectures in the industry.”
The initiatives all went live in one big bang, with implementation taking just 15 months; a comprehensive cloud business transformation that was completed in record time and all on the same date. For Rainer Wittwen, CEO of cbs, “the results are a lesson in rapid value creation. Since the go live, the new digital enterprise platform has been used to process all sales end to end, company wide and worldwide.”
A near zero downtime approach was adopted, minimizing the downtime of operational systems, while a selective data transition approach was followed for the technical transformation, using the standard software cbs ET Enterprise Transformer. 400 SAP plants and 58 company codes in 37 countries were migrated; more than four billion data records in total. The transition affected 3,000 system users worldwide.