Reorganisation in record time

Anyone who travels by tram or bus in Bonn will be familiar with Stadtwerke Bonn. With the group company “SWB Bus und Bahn”, the municipal company has been taking care of local transport in the city and region for more than a century. The Group company Stadtwerke Bonn Dienstleistungs-GmbH (or “SWB Service” for short) is responsible for the maintenance and repair of more than 200 buses and around 100 trams.

In order to be able to cooperate even better and faster, the Group planned some time ago to merge the two Group companies into the acquiring company SWB Bus und Bahn. However, merging the two companies also meant reorganizing the commercial SAP systems: This affected the profit centers and cost centers as well as the entire document history of the systems. It was also necessary to transfer all business operations of SWB Service to SWB Bus und Bahn as part of the merger and to realign them within SWB Bus und Bahn.

A special challenge of this project was that only five months were available for the project, which was not very much time for a project of this complexity and scale. Therefore, the SAP experts at GAMBIT had to carry out the core tasks of consolidation and reorganization in parallel, not one after the other as is usually the case in “classically” managed projects. In addition, SWB Bus und Bahn wanted to be able to continue with operative business as quickly as possible on the day the new system was launched. The specific goal was therefore to ensure that the processed documents were consistent and available for further processing. “This requirement of course gave us a further incentive to implement the project successfully and precisely as requested,” says Nadine Burghardt, Project Manager, Head of Tool MM + Basis/Technologies, and Senior Executive Consultant at GAMBIT.

SWB Bus und Bahn created a project structure and made expertise available for the project implementation through key users and SAP experts from information technology.

In order to avoid delays in the process and to be able to deliver the required quality in the end, the consultants had to plan and coordinate the project thoroughly from the very start and, above all, coordinate it continuously with all departments of the Group companies. “We provided SWB Bus und Bahn with comprehensive advice from the outset and kept them up to date with the planning and design. In addition, we continuously ensured the quality of the deliverables so that potential problems could be identified at an early stage,” says Nadine Burghardt. The consulting covered, for example, every module used, such as the consolidation module EC-CS. It also covered additional requirements for reporting.

The GAMBIT specialists worked with an SAP tool that had already proven itself on many occasions for cases such as this and that had already been used by the SAP experts to implement numerous projects: SAP Landscape Transformation 2.0 (SAP LT 2.0). This is a standardized tool that can be used to convert data objects in SAP architectures efficiently. In this project for SWB Bus und Bahn, the LT scenarios “company code merge”, “profit center merge”, and “cost center merge” were implemented in parallel. SAP LT 2.0 can also be adapted to customer requirements, for example, through additional implementations within the tool. The IT experts also used these, since the continuation of the SWB Service processes in the merger company was subject to special requirements that had to be mapped technically. The consultants used other tools as well: the data migration tool LSMW (Legacy System Migration Workbench) and special GAMBIT tools in the form of additional developments.

Throughout the entire duration of the project, implementations took place in parallel with test scenarios/efforts of the project participants at SWB Bus und Bahn, so that the quality was always directly checked and assured.

After five months, an outcome was achieved with which all participants were extremely satisfied. The SAP experts reached the goal set for the merger and reorganization, in close collaboration with the persons responsible and the project team at SWB Bus und Bahn. They kept to the budget and schedule, the go-live went smoothly, and the quality of the deliverables also met the client’s expectations.