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.