SAP S/4HANA Cloud in electrical supply

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is used as core system in the area of purchasing, settlement and procurement. We use it also as integration with external warehouse systems. It has a central role as single source of truth. Also we have integration Cloud Process orchestration and few more apps which are needed for field sales automation

We used the partner Demo system to demonstrate the capabilities and train our Key users , which on a later stage pass the knowledge to the real end users. It was a solution much better than the previously used tools and apps, most of them local ones and each serving different process and purpose. With S/4HANA we got all the processes in one place.

We have trainings from the partner company "Eviden Bulgaria". They were in the area of our most used processes like, Treasury , Manufacturing processes, Settlement & billing, Controlling and financial stuff. There were some secondary processes like customer engagement which were explored via the SAP documentation from the Key users, and they explained them to the real end users.

Our partner Eviden Bulgaria is preparing to us a kind of "What's new". Them, knowing our needs, proposing some refinement or slight changes of the way of work related to this new functionalities.

In General the first step was to convince the General Management the need of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. We got in touch with our local SAP implementation partner "Eviden Bulgaria" which also helped us with the case study and what are the benefits. The next part was to perform the users training and to adapt the users working habits to comply with S/4HANA cloud processes. There was some resistance but management team explains them very well that it is having impact on the sustainability of the company and the listing in the local stock exchange.

The major lessons learnt so far is that S/4HANA cloud is not that flexible and we had to adopt some process to the S/4HANA cloud way. Contrary with the on-prem or RISE implementations, where you have greater flexibility to customize the processes. Overall it is good that we have some standard framework now, but at some point it will not give us the freedom to things things differently from our competitors in terms of business processes. We do not need to take care for infra and system management but we are obliged to follow some SAP rules which not all the time are inline with our policies.