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Case study

The challenge

Our client, Gulf Medical Company (GMC), is a leading provider of state-of-the-art medical technology and solutions to hospitals and medical centers throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the gulf region. Prior to our engagement, GMC’s ERP system was ECC 6.0 with over 700 custom developments introduced over time to address previous business requirements. It needed enterprise systems that were able to adapt and scale to business needs on the fly. Therefore, the company wanted to leverage SAP S/4HANA’s innovative features, including Universal Journal, faster financial closing and SAP Fiori Apps. GMC’s additional goals included improving agility and business responsiveness by moving to SAP’s standard functionalities and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). Due to Cognizant’s industry-leading S/4HANA migration tools, accelerators and frameworks that enable clients to migrate faster with less risk, GMC turned to Cognizant for the migration to S/4HANA.

Our approach

We invested four weeks in analyzing GMC’s long-term business strategy, ECC landscape, integrated enterprise applications and custom developments. After our analysis of ECC, we proposed to retire the company’s SAP CRM Order-to-Cash processes before migrating to S/4HANA 1809. Leveraging our HANA Plus Tool and SAP Standard Tools for Conversion, we helped GMC successfully migrate to S/4HANA.

We used SAP-certified Cognizant SmartMove migration factory to help GMC migrate four SAP systems: Sandbox, DEV, QAS and PRD. Additionally, we migrated 77,000 open quotations and 3,000 sales orders from SAP CRM to S/4HANA. More than 30% of custom codes were migrated to S/4HANA standard processes using our Cognizant Diagnose Analyze Migrate Adapt (CDAMA) framework, and we helped GMC with the remediation of codes and migration of third-party integration from ECC to S/4HANA. After setting up the Fiori server and activating Fiori Apps, there was also significant improvement in employee experience with an improved UI.

Improving business responsiveness with S/4HANA

With the migration to S/4HANA, GMC streamlined processes across orders and quotations, enhanced system performance and reduced its database size with HANA DB 2.0. In addition, the increased use of mobile devices through Fiori applications resulted in enhanced visual data output for the company. Our solutions helped the company enhance its ERP system performance and business processes for sales, order-to-cash, procurement and logistics. The in-memory computing capability of S/4HANA helps GMC reduce data processing time significantly and makes data available in real time rather than through periodic batch jobs. Now GMC’s future upgrades will be much easier and less time-intensive, with faster response time in data warehousing and enterprise platform services.

80% improvement

in executive reporting time

40% decrease

in maintenance cost

30% decrease

in TCO

50% reduction

in customized development