Daher migration project background
DAHER is an international industrial company specializing in the aerospace, defense and industrial sectors. The company is structured around 3 complementary businesses :
- Aircraft manufacturing
- Aircraft equipment and systems
- Logistics and services
This family-owned French company today employs over 12,500 people and has operations in 15 countries, mainly in Europe and North America.
DAHER launched an invitation to tender in December 2022 for the conversion of its SAP ECC6 Ehp7 landscape on HANA and OpenText, with high stakes and constraints to which Applium is committed.
The customer has chosen to remain temporarily on ” on premise ” installations with plans to carry out a migration to S/4HANA Private Cloud (Rise) shortly. The French aircraft manufacturer has chosen to carry out a technical migration without activating any major functionality.
The chosen scenario is therefore a “Brownfield” conversion, with a migration to a functional perimeter and the refinement of certain processes.
A major constraint
- Project start-up in March 2023
- Release of the acceptance environment in September 2023
- Two dry runs in October 2023
- Production start-up mid-November 2023
Brownfield conversion project schedule
Certified by SAP, Applium carried out this conversion project using the publisher’s methodology, while mastering the challenges faced by the business: the 10STEPS2S4 method.
The first stage of the project was to prepare for the conversion of customer/supplier data and the migration of financial data. By running reports and using the tools provided by SAP, we were able to :
- obtain an overview of the activities required prior to conversion (checking master data and simplification elements)
- Assess the functional and technical impact
In collaboration with DAHER, Applium carried out workshops to define a suitable configuration, enabling data optimization in ECC while facilitating conversion to S/4HANA.
Each “conversion run” took place in 3 major phases:
Pre-conversion :
Conversion of customers/suppliers into Business Partners (BP), preparation of financial data and adjustment of parameters.
Technical conversion :
Pure technical gestures to convert an ECC6 system to S/4HANA
Post-conversion :
Once the S/4HANA environment had been converted, the financial data had to be migrated by an expert consultant, and all functional adjustments linked to version differences had to be made.
In order to migrate DAHER’s entire SAP landscape, Applium provided the first S/4HANA-converted environment (Dev), through the 1st “conversion run”, enabling DAHER’s IT team to carry out an initial acceptance test in July 2023. In September 2023, Applium delivered the recipe environment via the 2nd conversion run.
To facilitate the adoption of the new functionalities and help customers understand the major changes linked to S/4HANA and VIM, Applium organized skills-building sessions aimed at :
- Raise customer awareness of Business Process changes
- Understand how to set up the tool
- Supporting change
Despite severe scheduling constraints and operational complexities, the project team managed to carry out a “Dry-Run” at the end of October, as well as a second ” Dry-Run ” which proved necessary. This exercise marks the 3th “conversion run” and consists in simulating a conversion to S/4HANA under conditions as close as possible to those of the production launch. The result of the “Dry-Run” is decisive for the rest of the project, as it represents the execution time for all conversion tasks.
After completion of the pre-conversion stages on an open system, the conversion of the ECC production environment to S/4HANA was carried out between November 10 and 12, 2023.
S/4HANA go-live on schedule
In the space of 10 months, nearly 20 consultants were mobilized, with a variety of profiles including FI consultants, management control consultants, logistics consultants, ABAP, VIM, Fiori and BC experts…
OpenText solutions had to be migrated to be compatible with S/4HANA:
- OpenText 7.5 to 20.4
- Archive Server 16.2 to Archive Center 23.3
- Business Center Capture 16.5 to Intelligent Entreprise Suite 23.2
With Intelligent Entreprise Suite, Daher now has the latest generation of OCR, benefiting from Machine Learning technology and whose maintenance is now fully managed from SAP.
The availability of a Fiori launchpad broken down by domain, with almost 120 tiles:
- Treasury
- Credit management
- Fixed assets
- General ledger
- Internal sales
- International trade classification
- Inventory management
- Purchasing
- Supplier Invoices Verification
- Supplier Invoices Verification
The system was successfully put into production in November 2023 in 52 hours and 30 minutes, in line with the commitments made. Despite the difficulties inherent in this type of project, Applium fulfilled its role as a committed integrator, providing support throughout the entire project, from hypercare to the end of the warranty period.