Gunnar Glasneck, data workstream lead at tobacco company, Imperial Brands, describes his role as the data tower lead. He is responsible for data migration, as well the implementation of the company’s SAP analytical cloud.
Computer Weekly met up with Glasneck during the UK and Ireland SAP User Group (UKISUG) conference in Birmingham at the start of December to discuss the role of strong data management in successful SAP S4/Hana projects.
The company has grown through acquisition. This resulted in 50 or so ERP systems in operation, which were not truly integrated. Imperial Brands recognised it needed to bring all of these legacy ERP systems together into one single S4/Hana instance.
Understanding data has been a key factor in Imperial Brand’s successful S/Hana deployment. But as Glasneck notes, this was the toughest aspect of the project. It required blending capable people from the business and functional consultants and analysts. “I selected three people from business who are at ease with data,” he says. But this can be a challenge. “The topic of data ownership is difficult to implement if you don’t have a data culture,” Glasneck adds, which means there is a lack of data ownership in the business.
What is interesting from the conversation with Glasneck is that the company selected the UK and Ireland, one of its five primary markets, to deploy S/4Hana.
When asked why take this risk, Glasneck says: “I wouldn’t say it was a simple decision. Our ambition was to design a global template, keeping the core clean. But if you start with an easy factory, with say, two or three production lines, or a simple market, then you won’t get to the state where you have a global template, or at least a significantly advanced template which you can then roll out then to the other markets and factories.”
Looking at the approach the company has taken in terms of getting its data ready for S/Hana, he says: “We’re migrating data and this data needs to be validated by the business and approved. It is always difficult to convince people in the business that they own the data and they need to understand it.”
He says data was organised into three functional towers: global supply chain, finance and commercial. The people responsible for these data towers were provided with functional capabilities, which included data analysts and people from within the business.
“This enabled us to understand and profile the legacy data,” says Glasneck, which helped with data cleansing exercises as well as data mapping and documentation.
Having a hand-picked team from the business who knew local business processes and recognised the value of optimising and standardising processes, combined with system integrator consultants providing functional S4/Hana expertise, were key to the project’s success. Glasneck says: “We had a strong governance structure. The processes are always owned by the business and through the governance with our business design authorities and technical design authorities, we were able to present a design that was approved by the business.”
