Ericsson transforms to SAP S/4HANA in record time

Headquartered in Stockholm, Ericsson operates in more than 180 countries with some 94,000 employees, ensuring seamless connectivity round the clock.  

The Swedish multinational aims to empower companies across industries to become completely agile enterprises that are able to respond to shifting market dynamics in real time. To be able to do that, Ericsson needs to embrace new technologies, use them to drive continuous innovation, and deliver cutting-edge solutions to their customers. In keeping with this vision and recognizing that changing times necessitated an upgrade of the tech stack, Ericsson embarked on a large-scale transformation of the enterprise systems using SAP S/4HANA.

Challenge

Ericsson is a pioneer in creating technology for mobile communication and connectivity solutions.  

For nearly 150 years, Ericsson’s high-performing networks have been providing connectivity to billions of people every day. However, lately, the company recognized that their existing legacy ERP systems would soon begin to slow down their performance and escalate maintenance costs if not upgraded. Their systems already prevented them from leveraging new business innovations and meeting industry standards.

To add to this, the company was also facing growing business demands, such as:

• Modernizing their existing financial model to enable transparency, improve compliance reporting, and provide real-time processing capabilities
• Creating a resilient supply chain to improve employee and customer experience
• Enabling user-friendly and seamless processes to accelerate the launch of new products and services to market

Solution

Ericsson partnered with TCS to drive enterprise-wide transformation to SAP S/4HANA. 

The objective was to pivot to new business models and establish a strong foundation for agile and scalable business processes using SAP S/4 HANA.

TCS helped Ericsson:

• Devise a landscape strategy with integrated switch mechanisms for over 1,170 integrations and interfaces which ensured the availability of cost-effective infrastructure for the duration of the program.
• Create a sandbox environment for more than 100 upstream and downstream SAP S/4HANA applications.
• Provide robust end-to-end testing with over 1,000 business testers executing more than 4,000 scenarios with multiple variants to familiarize stakeholders with the application at an early stage.
• Enable early alignment on change freeze with stakeholders, along with legal and compliance requirements council.
• Reconcile over 90 business objects in the pre-prod environment and develop reusable custom programs for reconciliation.
• Execute SAP’s Downtime Optimized Conversion (DOC) to reduce downtime from some 180 hours to 54 hours, setting a new industry benchmark for such large-scale implementations.
• Accelerate planning, test strategy, and analysis of custom code with TCS Crystallus^TM and TCS Adaptive Transformation.
• Embed more than 50 Fiori Apps within SAP S/4HANA using TCS ACE+ which helped improve user experience.