Although the NOVA Chemicals ECC / SAP® Business Suite powered by SAP HANA® was current, it contained years of NOVA enhancements, as it was in use for 23 years. This current setup also did not support NOVA’s three times growth.
To solve this problem, NOVA launched a multi-phased program to transform its business processes and supporting system solutions with a tagline of “Run Simple, Run Best, For Growth.” To accomplish this, it converted an ECC version of SAP to SAP S/4HANA 1709 FSP02. The company purchased SAP’s suite of cloud solutions (SAP® Hybris®, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP® Ariba®, SAP® SuccessFactors®, and SAP® Concur®), and eliminated NOVA-specific enhancements and implemented cloud solutions based on “out-of-the-box” and industry best practices.
The result was a phase one complete—SAP S/4HANA 1709 FSP02—live in production as of Nov. 26, 2018, which included:
- Key “must-do changes” that must be implemented in line with SAP S/4HANA are now behind us (business partners, security model changes, and simplifications behind FI, SD, MM, FSCM, NOVA specific—SAP Railcar Management Component, client 001 separation, and all of the new code line changes that align with SAP S/4HANA 1709).
- Cloud solutions will integrate to a stable SAP S/4HANA environment vs. ECC then to SAP S/4HANA later.
- SAP S/4HANA Finance simplifications can be turned on/implemented on a timeline decoupled from cloud streams.
- IT organization is upskilled and current on NOVA business process and SAP S/4HANA functionality ready to support cloud.
- Cloud solution projects have been initiated and planned to be live in the late 2019 to mid-2020 timeframe.
We are well on our way to deliver a modern and flexible SAP platform supporting our company’s growth plans.
