BASF Central Europe Competence Center and BCC company have finished the migration of SAP corporate solutions from Germany to the USA. The project was a phase of a global project titled PACE and was carried out 5 Central-Eastern European countries.
PACE (Process and Application Consolidation Enterprise Systems BASF Group) project consists in homogenizing business and IT solutions used by BASF units worldwide. The systems in particular countries are transferred to a uniform corporate SAP system, which is located in the US (CAT – Common American Template). The project is divided into phases and carried out by local BASF competence centers.
PACE involves 17 sub-projects which started in 2005 and are scheduled to be finished at the end of 2008. PACE 4 sub-project covered the migration of five European BASF business centers (Northern, Western, Central Europe as well as Spain and Italy) into CAT system in the US.
In PACE 4 project BASF Business Center Central Europe in cooperation with BCC transferred the system to CAT only in 5 months. The following BASF units were shifted: Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.
‘The aim of the whole PACE project is to facilitate managing SAP system on the global level and reducing the cost of SAP infrastructure maintenance and development. On the objectives of the migration was also unification of business processes now carried out by BASF units for example in distribution channel management or in finance and controlling’, – says Łukasz Badura, Business Center Central Europe Information Manager, who manages IT department in Central Europe.
The works covered e.g. establishing the scope of functionalities of the system to be migrated, carrying out its migration, adjusting to the units’ requirements and the rules specified by system administrators. Also the process and system documentation has been completed. During the project standard forms of invoice, sales orders and supply documents were created. BCC has prepared and carried out the test of the new solution and assisted SAP users from particular countries during preparation to the productive start and during the first weeks of work with the new system.
‘Our project has been a big challenge in terms of organization due to a wide range of functionalities migrating and a wide geographical range of the units. There are more than 120 SAP users in five Central European countries. We had to ensure that everybody could start using the new solution at a planned moment. An additional difficulty was time limit. The measure of the common success of BASF and BCC team is the fact that all the functionality was transferred into use on time and on the first day the employees of BASF Polska issued in total more than 200 sales orders without any problem’, comments Katarzyna Jedynak, PACE 4 project manager in Central Europe for BASF.