You can transform finance systems with SAP

KPMG helped a global fleet management company replace multiple legacy ERP platforms, delivering a single source of truth to improve financial analyses and insights.

A global fleet management company was using a highly customized, highly complex mix of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms. As a result, it was taking too long to enter financial data and manipulate data for analysis and insights, particularly at the end of the financial year. Since this legacy infrastructure no longer had vendor support, it also created a risk to business continuity.

The company wanted to reduce the complexity of its ERP platforms, unify management with a single pane of glass, and build a foundation for modern technologies and digital solutions it was looking to implement in the future. The company decided to modernize by moving to SAP S/4HANA, a centralized ERP system that would connect and integrate data from all of its departments, including finance, human resources, and procurement.

While the company had decided on SAP as its platform, a partner was needed to help deliver an on-time and on-budget implementation with business-as-usual operations in the new SAP S/4HANA environment. The company originally brought in another partner, starting implementation in late 2021, but it wasn’t seeing the desired results. That’s when they brought in KPMG.

The global fleet management company was looking to replace its existing ERP platforms that contained legacy general ledgers and native systems. The goal was to standardize business processes, automate internal controls to support external audit and data quality assurance, transform in-scope business functions to enable future growth and enable all functions to support this growth by reducing time spent on financial data entry and manipulation while increasing time spent on analysis and insights.

KPMG introduced leading practices through process redesign and implementation of SAP technology, creating a strong foundation for future modernization and enabling the company’s broader digital strategy. This included improving and modernizing all finance systems in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, which would support the back office, drive operational efficiencies, and meet strategic corporate growth plans.

KPMG worked with the company to improve its finance backbone and deliver a single source of truth via one existing chart of account (CoA). Throughout this process, KPMG engaged multiple levels of executive leadership, including leadership at the highest levels, and ensured they were fully aligned on the company’s business and success outcomes.

KPMG also provided guidance and leading practice on Organizational Change Management (OCM) and worked with the global fleet company to develop an OCM strategy and plan. The company realized that managing change was one of the most critical factors to the success and adoption of the SAP program.

The project involved the provision of end-to-end professional services for SAP S/4HANA for several modules, including Record-to-Report (R2R), Source-to-Pay (S2P), Cash-to-Cash (C2C), Cash Management, and Tax processes across two deployments: Canada and the U.S., followed by Mexico. Additionally, KPMG also assisted the company with the development of Blackline transaction matching—which ingests data from multiple sources and automatically matches transactions—for the Canada and U.S. deployment. For all these processes in scope, KPMG also supported OCM and communications activities for the entire program.

KPMG delivered a variety of outputs spanning different phases of the KPMG Powered Enterprise framework, including:

• Validate: Validated and documented the S/4HANA solution.
• Construct: Built and tested the S/4HANA solution iteratively to ensure it was fit-for-purpose based on the previous requirements identified.
• Deploy: Ensured user readiness before going live with the new solution and transitioning to new ways of working within SAP S/4HANA.
• Evolve: Completed post go-live support, conducted knowledge-sharing activities, and documented lessons learned to continuously improve.

KPMG’s methodology is closely aligned with SAP Activate, which combines best practices, proven implementation methodology, and guided configuration tools to fast-track the deployment of SAP S/4HANA. KPMG brings accelerators, additional tools, and professional recommendations to the mix, but aligns closely with SAP methodology for a smooth, seamless rollout.

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