Last week, we heard from Tomlinson Group and Illumiti about how the two organizations worked together to complete part of Tomlinson Group’s multi-phased SAP S/4HANA implementation project in the midst of COVID-19. Vince Siemens, corporate controller and SAP S/4HANA program director at Tomlinson Group of Companies, and Nir Orbach, CEO of Illumiti, discussed the entire scope of the project, what steps were taken to move to a remote implementation, and how the two organizations worked together.

In part two, we’ll discuss the specific part of the SAP S/4HANA implementation that was completed remotely, the solutions the two organizations leveraged to stay organized, and any advice for SAP customers about to embark on their own remote implementation.

ASUG: What phases of your SAP S/4HANA implementation project did you all complete remotely? What sort of functionalities did you implement during this specific period?

Vince: With this phase, we did full finance, sales, and distribution. One of the biggest changes was our new billing cockpit, which was developed with Illumiti. This changed how we enter quantities that will get billed with a whole new set of apps. That was a major build. It was probably the single biggest new component of this phase of the project. As I said earlier, we rolled out 150 new users into multiple divisions. We didn't do an SAP S/4HANA version upgrade in this particular phase, but everything we rolled out allowed us to get a large group of construction employees running the same solution that other parts of our organization were running. This allowed us to support these employees working remotely as they were working through a really heavy year. Now, they are working on a system consistent to what many of their counterparts were using. As I said earlier, the last of our construction divisions will go live in April 2021.