SAP S/4Finance at EDEKA Hessenring

22th August 2018

EDEKA Hessenring is based in Melsungen near Kassel and is one of the regional companies of the EDEKA group. EDEKA Hessenring operates a large SAP system in its computer centre for the areas merchandise management, financial accounting and controlling. In the medium term, EDEKA Hessenring is planning to implement the so-called LUNAR RWWS for the mapping of its retailing processes – an SAP template developed by EDEKA’s IT subsidiary LUNAR for the use in all of the regional companies.

The LUNAR RWWS template comprises almost any conceivable retailing processes of the EDEKA group, but except for the integrated accounting processes no further financial applications are considered. The LUNAR IT architecture expects that, in general, an independent SAP system is used to map financial and cost accounting.

The challenge:

Before the transition to LUNAR, EDEKA Hessenring intended to transfer all financial processes from the existing system to an independent finance and controlling system. The target system should be a SAP HANA system, a duration of 7 months was planned for the entire conversion.

The implementation:

In December 2017, EDEKA Hessenring entrusted consenso with the migration project for the areas financial accounting, asset management and controlling. consenso put together a team of 6 employees.

Working together, EDEKA Hessenring and consenso selected the so-called green field approach in order to…

• finally drop some “old habits” and
• avoid dragging along unnecessary old data.

For the technical implementation of the migration we took advantage of the fact, that source and target system are up-to-date systems and decided to migrate the data with the help of IDOCs via the SAP-internal ALE interface. The advantages were obvious:

• No separate efforts for download and upload,
• no complex mapping in the involved systems as both systems know the same IDOC structures, and
• the processing routines of the standard IDOC message types could be used for postings in the target system.

It was planned to perform monthly test migrations from February to June, but due to technical problems during the HANA installation, the first tests in February and March could only be booked into a small sandbox. From April onwards a powerful SAP HANA system was available. The cutover test (end of May / beginning of June) was already almost free of errors, the data update took approx. 25 hours as expected.

The go-live:

Already three weeks before going live, we started to set up the productive FI/CO machine. In addition to the entire customizing settings, any and all master data sets including attachments were transferred before the actual go-live. On the go-live weekend itself, all transaction data and balances (more than 10 million documents) were transferred within 9 hours, the subsequent technical review ended with the production release 19 hours after go-live.