Manufacturer Everest Industries Enables Growth with SAP

Everest Industries’ SAP migration improves business performance

Everest Industries is gaining significant business benefits following a seamless migration to SAP S/4HANA 1709 that was spearheaded by DXC Technology. The transformation at Everest, a building products company based in India, improved its analytics, more tightly integrated its core business systems and streamlined its supply chain.

With a rich history of manufacturing building materials and pre-engineered steel buildings, Everest realized it needed to upgrade its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform to improve efficiencies and bolster operational capabilities to support expansion of its product portfolio.

Everest was running SAP ECC (ERP Central Component), which had undergone extensive customization and lacked the accountability, governance and controls to sustain the company’s expansion. Building on a strong IT services partnership, Everest turned to DXC to develop a transformation strategy. The logical move was to migrate to SAP S/4HANA 1709, which was released in September 2017 and features improvements in such areas as analytics, machine learning and user experience.

Better analytics, better business decisions

DXC’s first step was to, in very short order, evaluate the solution by putting together a proof of concept using real-time data and different business scenarios. Once a business value matrix identified and validated the expected process gains, DXC proposed an SAP S/4HANA 1709 transition roadmap that involved three phases. A primary goal was to leverage the new solution’s embedded analytics for better business controls and decision making.

The first phase of the transition focused on data cleansing to improve data quality, and then building a parallel SAP ECC instance in the cloud to enable a seamless transition with near-zero downtime. The second phase involved the migration, which DXC accelerated by using SAP Activate, an adoption framework for expediting SAP S/4HANA implementations, and a DXC-developed utility to identify unused custom code to remediate.

Facilitating future growth

Everest sees the solution as a platform for the company’s ongoing digital transformation. Company CIO KK Mishra says, “DXC’s innovative delivery approach, commitment to planned milestones, collaboration with our core business team, tools and accelerators, helped Everest achieve the SAP S/4HANA 1709 journey in just 100 days, with no loss of sales during the transition.”

In phase three of the transformation, Everest collaborated with DXC on a business value realization strategy that taps into SAP S/4HANA 1709’s advanced decision-making tools. DXC also guided Everest through a significant organizational change and helped develop a new operating model to facilitate future business growth.

DXC followed that up with a recommendation that Everest take advantage of SAP Fiori apps, an SAP product line designed to simplify the user experience across lines of business, tasks and devices. Business scenario recommendations and an SAP S/4HANA readiness check were used to identify relevant simplifications and the appropriate Fiori apps.

The new system is helping Everest improve operational efficiencies, such as resolving issues around order fulfillment and procurement. Integrating analytics capabilities on a single platform is saving significant time related to data consolidation for better business control and faster decision making. Plus, the adoption of Fiori apps is improving mobility capabilities and user experiences.

When Everest originally implemented SAP in 2012, its business was relatively straightforward, focused on manufacturing materials such as roofing products and boards. With the move to SAP S/4HANA 1709, Everest is now positioned to grow as a multichannel retailer with a fully integrated supply chain, so it can expand its product offerings and use data more efficiently to inform business decisions.