Cirque du Soleil’s Digital Transformation: A Leap into the Cloud with SAP S/4HANA

Cirque du Soleil, the world-renowned Canadian entertainment company, has captivated audiences for over 40 years. From its humble beginnings in Quebec, it has grown into a global phenomenon, selling over 11 million tickets annually and bringing its unique brand of artistry to millions across continents.

However, this success story is not about their dazzling performances, but of the company’s strategic digital transformation. Recently, Cirque du Soleil embarked on a significant technological upgrade, migrating to SAP S/4HANA to lay the foundation for future growth and innovation.

“This transformation wasn’t a simple upgrade,” Philippe Lalumière, vice president of IT at Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group tells SAPinsider. The project involved a complete overhaul of the company’s existing SAP ecosystem, a move to the cloud, and a significant restructuring of their IT department, all while the company was relaunching its shows after the COVID-19 pandemic. “The challenge was immense, but the results have positioned Cirque du Soleil for continued success,” he says.

How the Journey Began

Cirque du Soleil had been using SAP ECC since the early 2000s. While it served them well for many years, two key factors drove the decision to upgrade, according to Lalumière. ECC was nearing its end of life, and perhaps more importantly, over two decades of organic growth had led to extensive customization of the system. “While these customizations initially addressed unique business needs, they eventually created a complex and costly maintenance burden,” Lalumière explains. “With over 1,400 customized programs, the system had become unwieldy, making us recognize the need for a more agile and scalable platform to support our future ambitions.”

This realization coincided with a period of significant upheaval. The pandemic forced the company to halt its shows and lay off over 95% of its employees. Thus, when the time came to relaunch in 2021, the IT team had shrunk dramatically.

Lalumière shares, “We were rebuilding all our teams while relaunching the shows and starting our project to move to S/4HANA. For example, our IT team went from 150 before the pandemic to only 13 people. So, when I returned to work in May 2021, I found that my SAP team consisted of just one person.”

Despite these challenges, Cirque du Soleil made the bold decision to proceed with the S/4HANA migration. As one of the first Canadian customers of Microsoft Azure, having moved to the cloud in 2013, Cirque du Soleil already possessed a mature cloud infrastructure. This experience made the decision to embrace SAP’s RISE with SAP offering, a cloud-based solution for S/4HANA, a relatively straightforward one.

The Benefits of RISE with SAP

“RISE with SAP offered us several key advantages,” Lalumière notes. By migrating to the cloud, Cirque du Soleil could delegate the non-functional aspects of system maintenance to SAP, freeing up its limited IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives and customer-facing functionalities.

According to Lalumière, “This was particularly important given the small size of the IT team after the pandemic. Moreover, the move to S/4HANA provided an opportunity to clean up the heavily customized ECC system.”

He adds that they achieved this goal by streamlining processes and leveraging standard functionalities, which reduced the number of custom programs by 83%, from 1,400 to 239. “This simplification significantly reduced maintenance costs and improved system performance,” he says.

Another compelling reason for choosing RISE with SAP was its impact on business continuity. “While the headquarters in Montreal is critical for operations like costume design and financial management, the shows themselves can continue running even if the headquarters goes offline,” says Lalumière. “This mitigated the risk associated with cloud migration and addressed any concerns about operational downtime.”

Implementing the Project

Cirque’s implementation of S/4HANA was completed in less than two years, a remarkable feat considering the concurrent challenges of relaunching shows and rebuilding the IT team. The project was executed in two phases. The first phase focused on a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to get the system up and running quickly. The second phase involved further enhancements and optimizations, particularly for finance and costume workshops. “This phased approach allowed us to move forward rapidly while minimizing disruption,” Lalumière notes.

Still, the migration process wasn’t without its challenges. Lalumière says that data migration proved to be a significant undertaking as multiple ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) runs were necessary to clean up and standardize the data. He highlights this process with an example: “The process allowed us to reduce cost objects (WBS elements) from 140,000 to just 30,000 by implementing a simple custom field for city. This dramatically simplified financial tracking and reporting.”

Another challenge was the need to standardize data across languages, particularly for costume-related items, where terminology varied between French and English. The company also streamlined its procurement management with tighter integrations in SAP Ariba and used the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to implement all its integrations.

Change management was another crucial aspect of the project. “We recognized the need to support our employees through this significant technological shift,” Lalumière says. Thus, the company implemented training programs for technical and non-technical staff to get them acclimatized with the new system. “We highlighted that though the interface had changed completely, it was much more user-friendly and provided everything on one interface rather than use different ones for each function as was the case previously.”

In fact, special attention was given to the costume workshop staff, who had less technical experience than other departments.

The implementation and change management process also helped the company acknowledge the potential for job transformations. Additionally, Cirque du Soleil is now leveraging SuccessFactors, part of the SAP ecosystem, to track employee-related data for social impact reporting.

The Road Ahead

“We have also started to leverage the AI capabilities that are built into the S/4HANA system,” Lalumière notes. “We are using it to launch our first custom agent for financial operations.”  He concludes, “S/4HANA is the foundation for our future growth and within a year or so, we plan to start leveraging the capabilities of Joule with Microsoft Copilot.”

What This Means for SAP Insiders

Don’t underestimate the complexity of data migration. Cleaning and standardizing data is a critical, often time-consuming, aspect of any SAP migration. As Cirque du Soleil’s experience highlights, when undertaken correctly, data migration reduces costs and standardizes terminology. To achieve these goals companies must thoroughly plan and assess the data they want to migrate by data analysis and classification. They can also use solutions provided by SAP partners like SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management (SAP ADMM) by Syniti while engaging or collaborating with experienced SAP consultants and partners that specialize in data migration.

Change management is paramount. Migrating to a new system like S/4HANA impacts users across the organization. Invest in comprehensive training, address potential job transformations proactively, and tailor your approach to different user groups. Recognize that long-time users may have internalized system limitations, making process re-engineering a challenge. As Cirque du Soleil’s digital transformation journey highlights, emphasize clear and consistent communication to foster collaboration between the IT teams, business users, and management to create a positive environment for migration.

Consider a phased approach in your digital transformation journey. Implementing a large-scale system like S/4HANA can be overwhelming. A phased approach, starting with an MVP and then adding enhancements, can help manage complexity and minimize disruption. This allows for quicker initial deployment and provides flexibility for future improvements as highlighted by Cirque du Soleil’s digital transformation journey.