Delivering Business Value with SAP S/4HANA Finance

Customer Profile

Our client is a leading American regional grocer with over 200 supermarkets in the Southeastern United States. They offer their customers a wide variety of food products including grocery, meat and dairy, produce, frozen foods etc. Along with the supermarkets, they also own and run shopping centers, gas stations and a milk processing plant.

Business Challenges

The client was outgrowing their existing technology solution which consisted of various disparate ERP systems including SAP’s ECC 6.0.

• Finance processes were costly to run and maintain due to a poor level of standardization, and execution across multiple disparate solutions.
• Poor data integrity was compromising the quality of financial reporting, and inadequate in supporting their strategic growth ambitions.  
• A high degree of non-standard ERP customization had resulted in large system maintenance costs due to exceptions caused by poor process standardization.
• Vendor invoice management processes were labor intensive, error prone, and therefore cost inefficient.

Partnering with Applexus

Applexus implemented S/4HANA Finance as the digital core and foundation to an omnichannel retail solution. Its success formed the basis of an implementation roadmap leveraging Applexus’ unique RunWay approach. The S/4HANA Finance baseline enabled a new ongoing project to extend the Finance solution with S/4HANA Retail for merchandise management.

Benefits Delivered

Outlined below are some of the business value benefits realized by the S/4HANA Finance solution implemented:

• Optimizing all existing Finance processes to standard with automation helped realize operational efficiency and cost benefits.
• A newly introduced Master Data Governance framework has improved data integrity, and therefore the quality of reporting.
• Creating a single source of truth for financial data with S/4HANA’s universal journal has achieved improved financial reporting and data analytics to support strategic decision making.
• Improved cash flow and liquidity management with the implementation of Electronic Bank Statement Processing for all bank accounts.
• A reduction of DSO with newly implemented credit and collection management processes.
• Lease operation and collection improvements were achieved through the implementation of SAP Flexible Real Estate Management (Re-Fx) to support the management of all shopping center, store, and warehouse real estate.
• Deployment of InSITE, (Applexus’ vendor invoice management solution) at selected legal entities achieved a high degree of AP automation and cost benefits.

In addition to the direct Finance benefits above, S/4HANA Finance implementation provided a foundation that enabled:

• SAP Yard Logistics was implemented to improve throughput of product delivery into the warehouse and from warehouse to stores.
• SAP CAR was implemented to improve Sales Audit accuracy and efficiency.
• S/4HANA Retail Merchandising and Master Data capabilities are expected to improve Purchasing efficiencies, accuracy of prices to the stores and much more.