News
Copenhagen, September 25, 2020 - Computerworld magazine has announced the clear winner this year: KPS Consulting A/S, the Danish subsidiary of KPS AG. Since its foundation in 2014, the KPS team has been speeding up its activities on the Danish market.
KPS serves the entire Nordic market from its offices based in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo.
This all started with a transformation project at the Danish Salling Group, which launched a comprehensive implementation of the SAP retail solution in 2009. Jørgen Klüwer, Operations Director in the Bilka division in 2009, became the responsible Business Project Manager for what was probably the most important IT project in the history of the Salling Group. The project is still regarded as one of the most successful projects in the retail sector today. After about a year, the first country went live and within three years the solution was rolled-out to all other countries. The responsible consulting partner then was KPS. In 2014, KPS decided to invest in the Nordic market and asked Klüwer to join as Managing Director responsible for the development of the consulting business in all Nordic countries.
"I was convinced by the Rapid-Transformation method that KPS invented. It was crucial for the success of the project and, on top of that, the cooperation between KPS consultants and Salling was very good. When I was offered the opportunity to join KPS, I was really enthusiastic about it", says Jørgen Klüwer. "In recent years, we have experienced a real wave of success. In the beginning we were "undercover agents" - so to speak - because not everyone knew about KPS. This is very different today, but we have actually always concentrated more on really delivering what we promised to our customers and not just talking about it."
In the Nordics, the company has about 30 consultants, and Jørgen Klüwer is quick to point out that the good results are not only due to the small Nordic organisation: Naturally, the network of specialists and the delivery organisation within KPS's European operations are also supporting the Nordic operations.
The company bought the small Danish SAP consultancy Saphira. This not only sent a number of Danish SAP specialists to KPS, but also expanded the company's customer portfolio. In the following year, the company continued to grow strongly and won two new customers - Coop and Elgiganten. Just when KPS took over the project responsibility for the roll-out of digital marketing, service center and e-commerce for Elgiganten, it also signed the contract for one of the largest Danish and European S/4HANA projects, the Coop One project at Coop Denmark - almost the same day. SAP S/4HANA is SAP's latest ERP engine, replacing the previous ERP version SAP ECC from SAP for which support will expire in 2027.
The two major SAP-based projects are not the only ones: KPS served no less than 40 customers in the Nordics last year. KPS' approach to implementing SAP solutions is based on a "transformation-as-a-product" strategy, where customers are given the opportunity to experience their future solutions with their own data in a live SAP environment, and all that within a few weeks, not months:
"As one of the only SAP partners in Europe, we have a comprehensive SAP system landscape up and running with integrated end-to-end processes and all imaginable modules, whether for the core business areas of the company or for a personalized customer approach in e-commerce, marketing or sales. This is not just a demo system - it is the foundation for our customers future process and system landscape. That is a pretty convincing reason for customers who are still somewhat unsure about how to approach the not so simple task of migrating to SAP S/4HANA, for example," says Jørgen Klüwer.
the consultancy company is also doing well in Sweden, Norway and Finland and has become very well established within a short period of time.
And why should customers switch to S/4HANA now and not in a few years' time?
"The SAP talk usually starts around the smart company. What does it really take for the CIO, COO and CFO to make their company fit for the future? We already know that this will require a higher degree of agility and flexibility. If a company stands on an outdated system landscape that makes it impossible to connect and digitize the different areas of the company to the outside world - it will simply be lost. The change is happening so fast that this step has to be taken now, even if the full extent and nature of the change is not known at this point". Jørgen Klüwer, Managing Director KPS.
