Vol­vo Group updat­ed the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty on its aggres­sive ​“SAP Dig­i­tal­iza­tion” agen­da, includ­ing mul­ti­ple SAP S/4HANA projects this year and next, in a heav­i­ly attend­ed ses­sion dur­ing the recent vir­tu­al ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Cen­ter of Excel­lence event.

In the ses­sion Wal­lace Hen­ry, Vol­vo Group SAP BTP and Enable Now Lead, recapped the S/4HANA tech­ni­cal upgrades and the tech­nol­o­gy and busi­ness strat­e­gy con­text as well as back­ground to ini­tia­tives across the group’s diver­si­fied busi­ness­es. The well-regard­ed Vol­vo Group busi­ness is a fam­i­ly includ­ing Vol­vo and Mack trucks, Vol­vo Pen­ta, Vol­vo CE and Rokbak con­struc­tion equip­ment, and Pre­vost and Nova busses.

An SAP cus­tomer for decades, Wal­lace said SAP solu­tions are crit­i­cal to Volvo’s North Star Archi­tec­ture, a com­pre­hen­sive pro­gram to deploy ​“a mod­ern, mod­u­lar­ized, and secure” tech­nol­o­gy infra­struc­ture and ​“infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice” to the businesses.

SAP the Enabler

What’s more, Wal­lace described SAP tech­nol­o­gy as ​“an enabler” across con­stant change where Vol­vo teams expect sys­tems to per­form reli­ably and to evolve with improve­ments, such as increased inte­gra­tion and process automa­tion, mobil­i­ty, and assured pri­va­cy and security.

While he not­ed that Vol­vo Group still has a ​“fair num­ber of SAP ECC instances,” the busi­ness­es cur­rent­ly have three SAP S/4HANA tech­ni­cal upgrades under­way. In addi­tion, Vol­vo this year is expect­ed to com­plete anoth­er S/4HANA upgrade that includes SAP Fiori and cloud adoption. 

Volvo’s 2023 agen­da includes plans for an SAP S/4HANA green­field project to replace ​“mul­ti­ple SAP ECC instances in glob­al use,” some since the late 1990s, as well as SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors implementations.

Busi­ness-Dri­ven SAP S/4HANA Greenfield

Wal­lace char­ac­ter­ized the green­field project deci­sion as ​“busi­ness driven.”

“It will allow us to make even more mod­ern­iza­tion with a clean­er start,” he said.

Even so, giv­en the mul­ti­ple recent tech­nol­o­gy projects togeth­er with the exist­ing infra­struc­ture, Wal­lace said, ​“We’re still work­ing on inte­gra­tions. For us, this is huge now giv­en the num­ber of [ERP] instances.”

He empha­sized the impor­tance of SAP Cus­tomer Cen­ter of Exper­tise (CCOE), SAP ​“learn­ing” resources, and ASUG resources for Vol­vo Group’s initiatives.

“We’ve lever­aged the CCOE” when ​“we look at, how do we con­stant­ly learn? How do we get the skilling? How do we adapt busi­ness and IT,” Wal­lace said, adding the val­ue of ASUG spe­cial inter­est areas, online resources, and chap­ter meetings.

“Any pain point you’ve got, some­one else may feel the same things and have an answer,” he said.