Britehouse successfully completes major SAP consolidation in the South African steel industry
Britehouse successfully completes major SAP consolidation in the South African steel industry
In a first for South African SAP environments and for the steel industry globally, Britehouse, Dimension Data’s specialist SAP practice, has completed the consolidation of five different SAP systems into a single master system at ArcelorMittal South Africa, Africa’s largest steel producer.
In a project that took 11 months and involved taking millions of records from the previous 10 years of the standalone systems, the consolidated system went live in April 2011 – with subsequent month-ends running as normal.
The short-term objective of the project was for ArcelorMittal to have one set of financial statements for reporting, eliminating the need for inter-company postings. Secondary objectives included enabling users to log into one system rather than four, and thereby, reduce the workload on the business.
During the bidding process, Britehouse took ArcelorMittal executives to visit international sites where successful consolidation projects had been done by its German partner, Corporate Business Solutions (CBS). CBS has developed a framework that manages the mapping, configuring, extraction, manipulation, and migration of data in SAP consolidation projects.
“Those trips proved to ArcelorMittal that what they were planning could be achieved more cost-effectively and in far less time than they had been led to believe,” says Britehouse Executive, Hendri Pretorius. “Our subsequent delivery on those promises proves that, whether a company needs to adapt historical systems to a new template or business model, replicate processes from one geographical area to another, or simply make their business more agile, consolidation of SAP systems doesn’t have to break the bank.
“And, with the right processes and frameworks in place, it doesn’t have to take forever.”