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Copenhagen/ Munich, November 8, 2023 – In cooperation with KPS, a leading partner for customer-centric business transformation, the Danish retail group Coop Danmark successfully implemented and orchestrated a comprehensive SAP S/4HANA migration of its end-to-end process landscape, ranging from procurement to supply chain, sales and finance.
The Coop SAP S/4HANA transformation followed a Greenfield approach in close cooperation with KPS experts, to improve end-to-end processes and to seamlessly integrate them into Coop’s customer journey. This approach offers great optimisation and standardisation potential; a chance that the more than 150-years old company leveraged to put its processes to the test and bring the organisation ahead into the 21st century. This also encompassed a company-wide cultural change, which included administration employees, central procurement, and category teams as well as thousands of store associates, warehouse workers and independent store owners that were introduced to a new way of working.
To achieve this, KPS consultants brought not only their in-depth SAP expertise, but also a change management-based strategy. With the approach of “seeing-is-believing", KPS facilitated a number of so-called Structured Walk Throughs from the very outset of the project, in which hundreds of Coop key users, management and other stakeholders from across the organisation got a first-hand view of their new platform, gradually preparing and understanding the impact on the new ways of working.
The project launched in 2018 with an agile wave approach and was divided into several go-live stages to implement the new solution with good balance between pace and reduced risk, which was adjusted to the business. Through the KPS Instant Platform approach Coop was able to manage the end-to-end flow of 52 percent of the article categories in the new solution in 2021 already. The next milestone followed in March 2022, with 73 percent of total turnover running via SAP S/4HANA. Next, in October 2022, Coop achieved the goal of operating its entire article portfolio via the SAP S/4HANA Retail solution delivered by KPS. This included the migration of approximately 1/4 million articles in the non-food, bread, frozen food, and meat categories to the new SAP system. With the successful transfer of the remaining finance and accounting system in September 2023, Coop now uses a highly standardised state of the art SAP system that allows a faster time-to-market for IT innovations.
By implementing the KPS Instant Platform, a preconfigured SAP system, Coop was able to work with a ready-to-use, fully composable solution from day one. With it, Coop benefits from a faster time-to-market in the span of just a few go-lives and the opportunity to integrate consumer needs during the migration. In addition to several opportunities for ad-hoc improvements that became apparent and were subsequently added during the process, the initial approach enabled Coop to integrate further systems based on industry best practices delivered by KPS, such as the KPS Delivery Calendar.
“We have digitalised Coop’s value chain from an end-to-end perspective, with all the benefits that come with this approach. All the modules that are required, such as SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR), SAP Extended Warehouse (EWM) as well as our integrated KPS solutions are working hand in hand to make the whole delivery process more effective, transparent, and cost-efficient”, comments Casper Hovard, Managing Partner at KPS
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