GAMBIT relies on the public cloud

As soon as SAP S/4HANA came onto the market, GAMBIT was already ahead of the curve. The SAP consulting company from Troisdorf near Cologne was in fact the first customer to implement SAP S/4HANA back in 2016. “We were keen to build our knowledge and thoroughly explore the new technology as soon as possible,” says Thomas Pasquale, founder and managing partner of GAMBIT Consulting.

“At the time, however, there were neither SAP Best Practices nor the extensibility options that exist today. So we implemented SAP S/4HANA in the customary, accepted manner for the time; like a traditional ECC system in terms of the functions and processes,” he adds.

By 2022, the existing contracts for SAP S/4HANA were up for renewal. However, this would have meant committing to on-premise for another few years.

“For me, it represented the perfect opportunity for us to consider a move to the public cloud – a new operating model for SAP, but, in our view, the operating model that offered the greatest potential for the future,” explains Pasquale. “The public cloud is the standard – and is also likely to be the future ERP standard.”

“GAMBIT is a fast-growing, innovative company. We are currently facing the same challenges as many of our industrial and SME customers: market dynamics as well as a need to reduce complexity, improve process flexibility, and respond to the changing needs of our employees,” he adds. “And because we deal intensively with these strategic drivers and possible solutions in consulting and for our own business, it was clear to me that the public cloud could also bring the greatest long-term benefits for us at GAMBIT!”

To verify the suitability of the public cloud as an operating model for GAMBIT, the company initially conducted a preliminary study in mid-2022. “Rather than rushing the transition, we wanted to follow the same process as we do for our customers and gather together the data and facts to demonstrate the feasibility and added value of the project,” Pasquale explains.

The experts thus followed the trusted GAMBIT Roadmap program, which has been used for many GAMBIT customer projects. The preliminary study for SAP S/4HANA answers the most important core questions that companies have regarding a planned implementation, focusing specifically on strategic goals, operating model, costs, risks, target processes, and degree of coverage by the SAP standard.

“The crucial thing is that, after the preliminary study, companies have exactly the facts and figures they need to make an informed decision,” explains the GAMBIT managing director.

This was also the case for GAMBIT: “Among other things, we analyzed all our company processes and completed a best-practice mapping. This comparison with the SAP standard is extremely important because the degree of coverage indicates whether a standardized system is suitable or whether too much customizing would be required. For GAMBIT, the degree of coverage was calculated to be 88 percent; an excellent value that showed that the highly standardized public cloud would be a great option for us,” Pasquale adds.

At the end of the preliminary study, not only had the suitability of SAP Best Practices for GAMBIT been confirmed, but there were also reliable insights into the achievement of strategic goals and resolution of existing gaps as well as a potential target system landscape and a robust costing. The most important finding of the study, according to Pasquale, was that there were no major differences between the private and public cloud, so everything spoke in favor of moving to the public cloud.

The GAMBIT Managing Director continues: “It was clear to us that the transition would have a big impact on many of our employees as moving to a highly standardized, Internet-based ERP system brings a swathe of changes, not purely in respect of the work interface from GUI to Fiori.

In finance, for example, some of the processes are still running a little slower than before while some, allocations for instance, have changed completely and required a rethink. Initially, some of the employees who use the system every day were less than enthusiastic, but are slowly coming round to the new way of doing things,” says Pasquale.

“In meetings, I made a point of emphasizing the great strategic importance of the project not only for our own business, but also for us as an SAP partner that advises and supports other companies.” “I also pointed out that, with the public cloud, there are many areas with better performance than before and that the pace of innovations and adaptations by SAP is extremely high. Let’s not forget that SAP S/4HANA itself had a few teething troubles in the early days. However, there are few who recall this today because the issues have long since been resolved!”

As the changes involved are often significant, change management is a key success factor in projects such as this. As Simone Sender del Castillo, project manager for the public cloud implementation at GAMBIT, explains, “Intensive support for the transition is essential; ideally from day one.

Even we, a consulting company with our own change management division, could have done more at the outset. This was an important lesson for the customer projects that are now coming. It is especially true for the time estimated for training employees. Here, too, it is better to schedule a little more time than too little. Our internal finance department, for example, has gone from a highly customized system to the non-customizable SAP standard. This represents a major shift, which must be accompanied by ongoing training and testing, not to mention regular discussions,” Ms Sender del Castillo continues.

However, as Sender del Castillo also explains, implementation of the public cloud also has a major impact on efficiency as it requires a company to take a close look at all processes and workflows. “This is essential,” she stresses.

“So this is precisely what we did. In key design workshops with the operations department, we decided, for example, to further automate processes and reduce the workload on employees in the future through the use of AI for processing invoices,” Sender del Castillo concludes.

The design phase is part of the public cloud implementation, which was completed between September 2022 and June 2023. The GAMBIT experts used the GAMBIT process model, which is based on SAP Activate methodology with extra important elements added by GAMBIT. In the Discover phase, SAP’s starter system for the public cloud was used to test the company’s own processes against SAP Best Practice-based standard in the public cloud.

With GAMBIT’s consulting approach, a modern and digital architecture for SAP S/4HANA always follows certain design principles. First and foremost, it must be a SAP S/4HANA clean core deployment based on SAP Best Practices which, unlike in the past, remains devoid of customization. This clean core is then extended using the extensibility framework, SAP’s business cloud apps, in-house developments with cloud apps, or the integration of external systems – all connected via API interfaces that enable real-time communication.

For the public cloud implementation, GAMBIT used various SAP Best Practices, including the YCOA chart of accounts, professional services in the project system, resource-related billing, and – essential for the public cloud – the new SAP Fiori user experience.

GAMBIT also used the extensibility framework to extend the public cloud; adding standard CDS views and specific custom fields, for example, and using digital SAP Cloud apps such as Concur for travel and expense management or side-by-side apps for sales forecasting. Finally, the company integrated various external systems, such as Jira for support and the GAMBIT tool Kimai II for consulting service time recording.

According to Thomas Pasquale, GAMBIT’s move to the public cloud has already paid off. “We were able to optimize internal processes, further increase data transparency, and improve planning reliability. The structures we now have in place will allow us to keep growing. It is clear that the public cloud is the technological foundation for our further business development and a successful future.”

The strategic benefits for GAMBIT as a consulting company and therefore for its customers are enormous, adds Pasquale: “We have learned a lot in this project and built up a great deal of expertise, which will definitely pay off for our customers. We also wanted to learn from the mistakes that can be made in these types of project, and would rather make the mistakes ourselves, instead of our customers in their projects. We now know and understand the public cloud inside out and continue to learn in our day-to-day work. For me, this project has thus been a real flagship project with added value for everyone involved.”