SAP S/4HANA Implementation for Manufacturing Giant

The client, a $2B global manufacturing company operating 12 plants across the US, Mexico, and Canada, was running SAP ECC 6.0 with heavily customized modules that had accumulated over a decade of technical debt. Their finance team took 15+ days for quarterly close, inventory accuracy hovered at 72%, and they had no real-time visibility into cross-plant operations.

SAP's announced end-of-mainstream-maintenance for ECC created urgency. Previous attempts with two Big 4 consulting firms had stalled due to scope creep and cost overruns. The client needed a partner who could deliver a brownfield migration within 18 months at a predictable cost.

We deployed a 12-member dedicated pod from our India delivery center — 4 SAP FICO consultants, 3 MM/SD functional leads, 2 Basis/HANA administrators, 2 Fiori UX developers, and 1 program manager. The team worked with 6 hours of daily EST overlap.

Our approach centered on SAP's Fit-to-Standard methodology to reduce custom code by 60%. We conducted a Custom Code Migration analysis using SAP's tools, identifying 4,200 custom objects — of which only 1,100 required migration. The remaining were replaced with standard S/4HANA functionality.

We implemented a "factory-by-factory" rollout strategy, starting with the smallest plant as a pilot, then replicating across all 12 locations. Each rollout followed a standardized 4-week playbook covering data migration, integration testing, user training, and cutover.

The 18-month program was delivered on time and 15% under the original budget. Compared to the client's earlier Big 4 estimates, the total cost was 50% lower.

Financial close cycles dropped from 15 days to 4 days. Inventory accuracy improved from 72% to 97.5%. Real-time cross-plant dashboards enabled demand-driven production scheduling, reducing waste by 22%. The client's CFO presented the project as a case study at SAP Sapphire, highlighting the offshore delivery model as a key success factor.