The WiPro S/4HANA Case Study

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • This is the WiPro S/4HANA, which is part of our research study.
  • We evaluate the accuracy of this case study.

Introduction

WiPro with SAP Consulting is said to have implemented S/4HANA. We review the accuracy of SAP and Wipro’s claims.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

  • This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

Implementation Areas

The implementation was said to be the following areas of S/4HANA:

  1. S/4HANA Finance
  2. SAP Financial Cockpit
  3. SAP Fraud Management
  4. SAP Cash Management
  5. SAP Treasury and Risk Management

There were said to be several other components implemented, one being Business Objects. Here we have a common issue with the S/4HANA public case studies, which is that they seem to rapidly discuss functionality that is used that is from other SAP products. But as this paper is focused on S/4HANA, we can consider the list above complete.

  • If one looks at the scope of implementation, no outside of financial functionality was implemented.
  • The value proposition of S/4HANA for WiPro is unclear. The question arises whether WiPro implemented S/4HANA because it needed what S/4HANA had to offer to sell S/4HANA implementation services. As with all the SAP focused IT consulting companies, WiPro wants to obtain S/4HANA consulting projects. It is quite likely that WiPro consultants shadowed the SAP consultants on the implementation and that this was then added as experience to the consultants’ resumes.[1] That is, the overall implementation may have been driven not based upon the actual value delivered from S/4HANA but on the combination of marketing benefit and exposure to S/4HANA that WiPro would receive that it can then turn around and resell to its customers. Consulting companies do not have the workflows that would promote a company to implement an ERP system.

When Consulting Companies Self Implement S/4HANA

The issues with case studies of S/4HANA when self-implemented by consulting companies is its specific topic and is covered in the following article.

This S/4HANA implementation went live on January 15th, 2015.

The desire to sell S/4HANA projects and to get S/4HANA skills on the resumes of consultants is intense. I was consulting with one SAP Gold Partner selling S/4HANA projects but had no experience implementing S/4HANA. This company primarily sold to unsophisticated customers who would not have known to ask about specific S/4HANA experience in this company’s consulting corps.

I once asked the CEO and the head of consulting how they intended to successfully implement S/4HANA since they had no resources which had experience in S/4HANA. This being several years ago now, those resources would not be simple to acquire from the open market. When I inquired whether there was a plan to obtain S/4HANA resources from SAP that would transition knowledge to this partner’s consultants, I was told that it was unnecessary to “boil the ocean” in the conference call. My impression of this company was that they did not care how S/4HANA would be implemented and preferred to cross that bridge when they came to it.

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Conclusion

None of the consulting company’s self-implementations of S/4HANA appear credible.

This article is part of The S/4HANA Implementation Study. Please see that study for the overall conclusions.