(arvato Systems) Gütersloh, Germany – arvato Systems and the Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe Group (LVB Group) have successfully completed an 18-month joint project to design and implement standardized SAP processes.
A total of eight companies in the LVB Group are now working with standardized accounting processes after analyzing and migrating data from several SAP systems and their 48 interfaces to a new SAP client. Following careful, comprehensive preparations, the technical migration was completed within three months. It included successfully completing an annual financial statement and the first quarterly report for the 2015 fiscal year in the new SAP system.
Standardization and extensive automation allow the group to sharply reduce ongoing process costs and vastly improve the performance of existing accounting processes. Alongside efforts to standardize processes at the participating companies, the project also provided the opportunity to roll out new processes. It was also possible to optimize the SAP system settings and consolidate the migrated master data.
Sandy Brachmann, Head of Finance and Controlling at the LVB Group, is very satisfied with the results of the project. “The project to standardize the SAP financial transaction system is a key step towards implementing our new process-oriented management model as part of our Focus 25 corporate strategy. The project brought a number of challenges for the 200 employees and managers from across all departments and companies who were involved in the project. The high degree of professionalism in preparations leading up to the project and the hard work of everyone involved in the project on both sides allowed us to carry out the migration with only minimal disruptions and downtime.”
Uwe Felgenträger, project manager at arvato Systems, adds: “Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe has been using SAP for more than 20 years now, with all the benefits and challenges this brings with it. As part of our project, we migrated 3,900 ledger accounts and close to 20,000 material stocks, allowing us to remove a number of duplicate master data sets, for example. Employees get to know the familiar SAP software but with a new, more efficient design. This was one of the most exciting moments in the whole project for me.”
Process optimization at Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe is part of restructuring activities launched at the group back in 2011. The large-scale project, codenamed Focus 25 – Modern Mobility for Leipzig, seeks to achieve sustained growth at the company and ensure affordable mobility. The aim is to have public transportation account for one in four trips taken in Leipzig by 2020.
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