Reorganisation in record time

An institution in Bonn and the region

Anyone who travels by tram or bus in Bonn knows the Stadtwerke Bonn. With the group company "SWB Bus und Bahn", the municipal company has been taking care of local transport in the city and the region for more than a century. In turn, the group company Stadtwerke Bonn Dienstleistungs-GmbH, or "SWB Service" for short, is responsible for the maintenance and repair of more than 200 buses and around 100 trams.

In order to be able to cooperate even better and faster, the Group planned some time ago to merge the two Group companies into the acquiring company SWB Bus und Bahn. However, merging the two companies also meant reorganizing the commercial SAP systems: This affected profit centers and cost centers as well as the entire document history of the systems. It was also necessary to transfer the entire business operations of SWB Service to SWB Bus und Bahn as part of the merger and to realign them within SWB Bus und Bahn.

Only five months time available

A particular challenge of this project was that only five months were available for the project - not very much time for a project of this complexity and scale. Therefore, the SAP experts of GAMBIT had to carry out the core topics consolidation and reorganization in parallel - and not one after the other as it is usually the case in "classically" managed projects. In addition, SWB Bus und Bahn wanted to be able to continue with the operative business as soon as possible on the day the new system was launched.The specific objective was therefore that the processed documents must be consistently available for further processing. "This demand was of course a further incentive for us to successfully implement the project to the point", says Nadine Burghardt, Project Manager as well as Head of Tool MM + Basis/Technologies and Senior Executive Consultant at GAMBIT. On the part of SWB Bus und Bahn a project structure was created and know-how was made available for the project implementation by key users and SAP experts from information technology.

Comprehensive advice and ongoing coordination

In order to avoid delays in the process and to be able to deliver the desired quality in the end, the consultants had to plan and coordinate the project thoroughly from the outset and, above all, to coordinate it continuously with all departments of the Group companies. "We provided SWB Bus und Bahn with comprehensive advice from the outset and informed them about the planning and concept. In addition, we have continuously ensured the quality of the work results so that potential problems can be identified at an early stage," says Nadine Burghardt. The consulting included, for example, every module used, such as the consolidation module EC-CS. Furthermore, the consulting also covered additional requirements for the reporting system.The specialists of GAMBIT worked with a tool from SAP which has already proven itself many times for such cases and with which the SAP experts have already implemented numerous projects: SAP Landscape Transformation 2.0 (SAP LT 2.0). This is a standardized tool with which data objects in SAP architectures can be efficiently converted.

In this project for SWB Bus und Bahn, the LT-scenarios "Company Code Merge", "Profit Center Merge" and "Cost Center Merge" were used in parallel. In addition, SAP LT 2.0 offers the possibility to be adapted to customer requirements, for example through additional implementations within the tool. The IT experts also applied these, as the continuation of the processes of SWB Service in the merger company was subject to special requirements that had to be mapped technically. In addition, the consultants used other tools: the data migration tool LSMW (Legacy System Migration Workbench) as well as special GAMBIT tools in the form of additional developments.

Smooth go-live

Throughout the entire duration of the project, the implementation was accompanied by test scenarios/expenditures of the project participants of SWB Bus und Bahn, so that the quality was always directly checked and ensured.

After five months, the result was a result with which all participants were highly satisfied. The SAP experts achieved the set goal of the merger and reorganization - in close and trusting cooperation with the responsible persons and the project team of SWB Bus und Bahn. They kept to the budget and schedule, the go-live went smoothly and the quality also met the client's expectations.