Brought contracts, suppliers and SAP delivery in a global programme into a single view.

Starting situation

A globally operating logistics company was in the middle of its transition to SAP S/4HANA. The supplier landscape was fragmented: several vendors with their own contracts, plus a multitude of third-party applications with S/4 interfaces. Contract matters, supplier coordination and quality assurance ran separately from the technical implementation — provisioning, migration, data cleansing and testing each formed their own strands. In addition, the review of the system landscape depended on the client concepts as well as on the test and migration cycles. In sum, the dependencies between commercial, organisational and technical topics were not consistently visible to management.

Complexity profile

Mandate

The mandate covered building contract management within the transition, supporting contract negotiations, coordinating the suppliers and quality-assuring the migration, data cleansing and testing concepts. The aim was an interface between commercial, organisational and technical topics — so that management and delivery work from the same reality.

Approach

1. Build contract management

   Contract management was built within the transition: contracts, scopes of work and open negotiation points were captured in a structured way and assigned to the workstreams concerned.

2. Negotiations & suppliers

   Negotiations were prepared and supported in substance, and the suppliers were coordinated across the programme phases.

3. Quality-assure concepts

   In parallel, the concepts for migration, data cleansing and testing were quality-assured — with an eye to completeness, consistency and the dependencies on provisioning and third-party applications.

4. Shared view

   The results were translated into overviews that connect contract status, supplier status and technical implementation in a shared view and serve as a decision-making basis for management.