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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.”

Modernisation

Providing excellent service is part of what the organisation is. It is in our people’s blood, and in the IT environment. The systems with which Technische Unie supported all its essential financial and logistical processes in recent years were built in-house by the company itself. “Our mainframe did an amazing job. Then several people who worked on the system retired. Gradually, we lost more and more knowledge about the system and its processes. In addition, it took us longer and longer to develop new things that would be considered standard nowadays. We had to make a leap towards modernisation.”

Safe, phased rollout

Many TU processes were redesigned over the course of the project. The options that SAP S/4HANA offered as standard played a leading role in Technische Unie’s process design. Vreeken: “We really started thinking in terms of end-to-end processes, with the default best practices provided by SAP serving as the starting point.” The team only deviated from the standard when colleagues were able to present a case why a standard process was not adequate.

When implementing S/4HANA, Vreeken and the entire MT at TU opted for a safe and phased approach in which the legacy system was gradually replaced piece by piece. “We’ve gradually hollowed out our old environment. This meant that when we switched off a process in the old system, it went live in the new environment. Sometimes this was company-wide functionality. However, for some functionality we also approached it site by site. That meant 37 times over.” So as not to disrupt the day-to-day business – processing 100,000 orders per day – everything had to continue running smoothly. “That meant, for example, that we first converted ten customers to the new invoicing process, then one hundred and then one thousand. Only when everything was still working properly, did we switch the rest over.”

The switch to SAP is so much more than a technical exercise. Vreeken: “We came from a situation where everything had been built and developed to exactly match the needs of users and even individual customers. When you move to a new system, you need to mobilise the entire organisation, including all sales offices, to deal with that change. In the meantime, IT is no longer just a job for IT to deal with, but for the entire company.” The role of IT also changed, says Vreeken. “In the past, IT was the group of people that built what was requested. Now there is a close partnership with the business. We work it out together, we build it together, we manage it together. Putting our heads together, we are able to improve things further. This project has changed the way we work together, not only with each other, but also with our customers and suppliers.”