Technische Unie provides excellent service with SAP S/4HANA

The technology wholesaler Technische Unie is known for its more than comprehensive product range and excellent service. The existing mainframe, which was built in-house, and was one of the driving forces behind the success of Technische Unie, needed replacing after forty years of faithful service. Ctac assisted Technische Unie with the implementation of SAP S/4HANA, a project that can best be compared to open-heart surgery. And it couldn’t be allowed to get in the way of the 100,000 orders the company processes every day.

Wholesaler Technische Unie, part of the French family business Sonepar, is the Dutch market leader in the field of technical installation equipment. Small and large industrial plant engineering companies rely on Technische Unie for all their products. They can buy them via the web shop or any one of the 37 physical sales outlets. “Our product range consists of 300,000 regular and two million non-regular items. We have more than 100,000 products in stock,” says Sander Vreeken, IT Director at Technische Unie. “Despite the fact that we process more than 100,000 orders a day, our motto is: order today and receive tomorrow.”

In addition to its enormous inventory, Technische Unie has another unique selling point: excellent service.
Whatever a TU customer needs, wherever that customer needs it, Technische Unie makes sure it is delivered. The company also supports its more than 40,000 customers with an ever-increasing number of services. For example, Technische Unie can ensure that the installers’ vehicles are restocked overnight. Vreeken: “We want to make life as easy as possible for our customers, as far up the chain as possible.”

Partners, not suppliers

After a careful selection process, TU chose SAP S/4HANA, a state-of-the-art ERP solution from SAP combined with a WMS from Manhattan Associates. “We explicitly chose Best of Breed,” says Vreeken. “Everything in which we cannot distinguish ourselves, we want to support with the best possible standard software.” Ctac became responsible for the implementation of SAP S/4HANA. “We chose Ctac because of their experience in the market, their references and the team. Especially the latter was very important to us. An implementation like this is people work. That’s why you have to have a good click with each other. We don’t look for suppliers, we look for partners who challenge us. That approach has worked,” says Vreeken. He has the feeling that Technische Unie, Ctac, SAP and Manhattan outgrew the standard customer-supplier relationship during the project. “It is quite a unique situation that people from Manhattan, SAP and Ctac suddenly talk to each other so well. A situation arose in which we looked for solutions together and wanted to make a success of it together. That is necessary when you have to replace a complex system that is more than forty years old in a process lasting several years. Then not everything is clear cut. We only stopped when it worked. The great thing: very good solutions came out of that.” The result of this close cooperation includes the world’s first-ever integration between SAP S/4HANA and Manhattan.

Safe, phased roll-out

Many TU processes were redesigned over the course of the project. The capabilities that SAP S/4HANA had on board as standard were leading for Technische Unie’s process design. Vreeken: “We really started thinking in end-to-end processes, using SAP’s standard supplied best practices as a starting point.” Only when colleagues were able to provide good justification as to why a standard process did not suffice would the team deviate from the standard.

When implementing S/4HANA, Vreeken and TU’s entire MT team chose a safe and phased approach where the legacy system was replaced bit by bit. “We gradually ate it out of our old environment. That meant we deployed a process in the old system after which it went live in the new environment. Sometimes these were company-wide functionalities. But it also happened that we tackled some functionalities per branch office. And then that 37 times.” In order not to disrupt the daily business – processing 100,000 orders a day – everything had to keep running smoothly. “For example, with the new invoicing process, that meant we first converted 10 customers, then 100, then 1,000. Was everything working? Only then did the rest go over.”

The switch to SAP was much more than a technical exercise. Vreeken: “We came from a situation where everything was built and developed exactly to the needs of users and even individual customers. When you move to a new system, you have to mobilise the whole organisation, including all sales offices, to deal with that transformation. Meanwhile, it is no longer a package of IT but of the whole company.” The role of IT has also changed, Vreeken notes. “IT used to be the little club that built what was asked for. Now there is a close partnership with the business. We think it up together, we build it together, we manage it together. Together, we are able to optimise things further. This project has done something to the way we work together, with each other, but also with our customers and suppliers.”

Great team performance

Looking back on the implementation, Vreeken describes the roll-out of S/4HANA as a great team effort. “Everything depends on this,” he says enthusiastically. “We are working on a new technical foundation for Technische Unie. But this is so much more than an IT project. We had to learn together to think much more in terms of processes. This brings with it new roles, jobs and responsibilities. It is fantastic to see all that movement.” He also enjoyed working with Ctac. “We don’t regard Ctac as people who come in to do some programming now and then. They challenge us, ask us why we are making certain choices. Not only the IT staff, but also on the business side. Ctac helped us to adjust some processes and create new functions.”

Although S/4HANA is live, the door is open for further innovations. However, Vreeken is in no hurry for this. He first wants to get his colleagues used to the new environment and to complete the project. “The SAP and Manhattan solutions we have today are five steps ahead of our old system. But if we decide we want to add new options, there are already more than 172 SAP apps that we can use out of the box. In addition, together with SAP and Manhattan, I want to look at what we can develop further in order to support our customers even better and even earlier in the chain.”