Arlanxeo, a global leader in synthetic elastomers, has greatly simplified its consolidation process with SAP BPC Optimized for S/4HANA. In addition, the company benefits from real-time insight into its financial figures. SAP partners Finext and Plainwater supervised the implementation.
ARLANXEO's core business is the development, production and marketing of synthetic high-performance elastomers for use in the automotive, tire, construction and oil and gas industries. The company was formed in 2016 as a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and chemical group Lanxess. In late 2018, Saudi Aramco acquired all shares and became 100 percent owner of Arlanxeo.
That development brought major implications for the IT landscape. In fact, Arlanxeo was using Lanxess' systems until then. A complete "rip and replace" of the existing infrastructure was therefore necessary.
Opportunity
Arlanxeo saw this situation as an opportunity to modernize its IT environment from the ground up, completely according to its own needs and insights. As a basis, the company chose an on-premises variant of SAP S/4HANA, hosted in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC). This modern ERP platform acts as a catalyst for all relevant business processes. It also provided an ideal basis for accelerating the consolidation process. To this end, it recently completed the implementation of SAP BPC. With the new solutions, Arlanxeo also embraces the standard processes involved, saying goodbye to the old, historically grown landscape with many customized solutions.
Faster and simpler
After a smooth implementation process, Arlanxeo benefits from a greatly simplified BPC environment. The increased speed of the process is also a key benefit. "Currently, we need 8 days for the closing of our various legal entities. Our parent company demands consolidated reporting on the sixth business day. Thanks to SAP BPC, we have a perfect starting point to meet this in the future. Moreover, the integrated, simplified environment has enabled us to reduce three profit and loss (P&L) statements to a single P&L report," says Manfred Wicker, head of finance and controlling platforms at Arlanxeo.
"By using the latest HANA technology, we were able to virtualize the calculation as much as possible. This has a positive effect on overall process time and reduces data duplication," adds Bastiaan Sanders, Senior SAP BI Consultant at Plainwater.
"By using the latest HANA technology, we were able to virtualize the calculation as much as possible."
Real-time insight
Performance and simplicity are not the only benefits of the revamped IT environment. Through the tight integration of the dedicated SAP BPC version with S/4HANA, Arlanxeo benefits from a "single source of truth. "Changes and business transactions in S/4HANA are immediately available in BPC. The near real-time delivery of items to the new consolidation platform makes us much more agile and improves the quality of our decisions," explains Wicker.
Close cooperation
For the implementation, Arlanxeo leaned on the knowledge and experience of Finext and Plainwater. Thanks to close cooperation and an agile/scrum approach, the new environment was up and running within a few months. "Because we were able to build an entirely new IT environment, agile/scrum was a logical choice. You can then quickly assess the impact of new processes and changes with each other," Sanders says. "With a waterfall method, such major changes would not have been possible, or at least would have taken longer."
Arlanxeo also has a close working relationship with SAP. Wicker: "We spar directly with SAP's S/4HANA development team. That way we benefit from their knowledge and experience, and we can use new or even planned functionalities as soon as possible. Moreover, we can hint to them about possible future improvements in the software and suggest bugs."
"We spar directly with SAP's S/4HANA development team. That way we benefit from their knowledge and experience."
Future plans
By mid-2020, the S/4HANA rollout will be complete and Arlanxeo will have a fully integrated IT landscape. The company will then focus on usability and further process improvements by implementing more Fiori Apps and using RPA (Robotic Process Automation). "With our new IT infrastructure, we are prepared for the future. Moreover, thanks to the experience we have gained, we will soon be able to help Saudi Aramco when they start working with S/4HANA," Wicker concludes.
