Last week, we heard from Esri about how the company began its SAP S/4HANA journey. Rob Seifert, senior manager of financial systems at Esri, and John Austria, SAP S/4HANA program manager at Esri, walked us through how the company choose SAP S/4HANA, built its business case, and how the ERP solution has improved business processes. In part two, we’ll examine how Esri navigated this project through COVID-19 and John and Rob’s advice for SAP customers who are about to embark on similar projects.

ASUG: Part of this project happened during COVID-19. How did you all initially ensure the safety of your employees who are working on this project while also making sure it was on track and organized?

John: Like just most everyone else, the COVID-19 impacts hit us really quickly and unexpectedly. We were in the midst of our project, which had kicked off in July 2019, and we had our PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) partners on-site with us. By early 2020, we were already starting to hear inklings about the virus and what was going on internationally. Luckily, we started planning a few weeks before the broader U.S. lockdowns started. We didn’t want to be caught off guard if we were forced to go to a fully remote working model for the project.

Things fortunately aligned for our team and project. PwC’s leadership instructed all of their consultants to work from home. We had the same directive from our executives as a full work-from-home policy was instituted by late March of 2020. As a company and as a project team, we had already started leveraging technologies such as Microsoft Teams to collaborate. I would say it was a pretty seamless transition for us. At the time, our major concern was around how were we going to organize and operate our design and build sprints. During these sprints, you’re typically in a room working together and you're whiteboarding.