your journey
Informa | Publishing
Working alongside PWC to ensure the integration and deployment aspects of the global transformation programme were delivered as required and that all legacy migration was successful.
Informa engaged Limelight to look at the deployment aspect of a large scale business transformation programme. This involved a significant legacy SAP system rebuild and migration, business change tasks, integration architecture development/readiness and staggered cutover planning and activities.
Problem
Informa had decided to contract a large scale global transformation programme to PWC. The programme was moving as planned but Informa wanted to ensure the business transformation activities around change, integration and cutover were managed by a third party independent expert team. They recognised that this was the critical aspect to the programme and wanted an expert team to ensure business readiness and cutover.
Integrations were a challenge through the volume and complexity of the third party systems the new ERP solution would be talking to. Many of these were highly customised and Informa recognised the need to carefully plan the design/deploy/test phase to ensure they were functioning as per the new business processes within the transformation programme.
Lastly, running parallel to the above was the need to migrate a large legacy SAP instance which was highly customised into the new solution, together with all its data. This needed careful planning and execution to ensure it was fully functioning with the new SAP system.
"Rebuilding an entire SAP instance seemed impossible, but the Limelight team delivered as required"
Insights
- Management of the integration layer of the global programme - from requirements gathering through to deploy
- Change management - from communications to education and training
- Business readiness checks and signoffs
- Full global rollout and cutover management
- Full rebuild of legacy SAP system on new SAP instance, full testing requirement and migration of all legacy data
Solutions
The Limelight team took control of the deployment function, working alongside PWC and ensured the business were ready and capable of 'receiving' the new SAP deployment. The change management function was professionalised and standardised through the use of some of the Limelight accelerators and business readiness checklists were implemented.
The global cutover plan was scripted to a meticulous level of detail and business change agents were deployed to each region. They were the local points of contact to manage the local business and technical teams.
Running parallel to the above, teams worked tirelessly on the SAP legacy migration - recreating the customisation and migrating the legacy data into the instance. Deadlines were tight, but achieved, in order not to frustrate the overall global transformation programme.