LaTrobe University S/4HANA Case Study

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

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

Introduction

LaTrobe University, a university based in Victoria, Australia. LaTrobe is one of the few cloud-based S/4HANA implementations. These few cloud-based S/4HANA implementations are also found in the private case studies, which contradict much of the information provided by SAP regarding the ability to run S/4HANA from a variety of delivery models, including on-premises public cloud and private cloud.

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. 

“By the end of 2015, all of La Trobe’s SAP software will be delivered through the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC), hosted from a local data center.” – SAP

“With instant access to reliable information about grant money, researchers will spend more time on innovating for value. Consolidating data across the library, parking and other administrative areas will provide students with one centralized source for updated information, allowing them to focus on academics. Real-time data will also give La Trobe an immediate view into student performance, mitigating costly attrition rates.”

“regarding licenses, it’s cheaper for us to move away from on-premise and go to the cloud by a significant amount. With this investment, we’re getting a decrease in capital expenses and depreciation and a small shift in OPEX,” he said. “We’re being watched by many organizations in other industries. Within six to 12 months, I envisage some other organizations investing in this technology – and that’s exciting.”

LaTrobe states that it went live with SAP Finance in 20 weeks.

Universities Using SAP ERP

It should be understood that SAP’s historical penetration into the education market has been small. One apparent reason is that education does not require an ERP system as they do not manage physical products (aside from textbooks, computers, desks, etc.) Most of these things, except textbooks, are a poor match for a perpetual inventory system that can run MRP as few of these items are resold. This type of procurement is called direct procurement, where the entity consumes the procured items themselves. For this type of requirement, one can use a cloud inventory management system, obtained at a meager cost. At the time Latrobe implemented, SAP’s system was not integrated into the Finance module in any case, so there was no integration argument for SAP to use to justify the purchase (something I will discuss in a moment)

How Much of the S/4HANA Must Remain Unused by LaTrobe?

Because of this, most of S/4HANA’s modules and functionality will stay permanently unused by LaTrobe. And this is because they lack the workflows to use these other modules.

Therefore, it was curious to learn that LaTrobe had already gone live with the MM or materials management (aka inventory management) module in ECC and the PM or project systems module. As S/4HANA was not implemented for these modules, S/4HANA Finance had to be integrated into these modules. Thus, Latrobe was/is using a combination of S/4HANA Finance with ECC.

The Budgets for Universities Versus Private Companies

Another reason universities are infrequent purchasers of SAP ECC historically is that universities typically do not have the IT budgets that large companies do have. And, of course, University workflows don’t match up with the functionality of ERP systems.

LaTrobe had already implemented ECC, so S/4AHANA was considered an upgrade for them, but S/4HANA is not an upgrade for the following reasons.

  • Every company that purchases S/4HANA may get it deeply discounted. However, it is not a free upgrade, as were previous new versions of ECC for companies that already were ECC customers.
  • ECC cannot be “upgraded” to S/4HANA. Instead, a new implementation must be performed.

I was unable to find the exact go-live date for S/4HANA at LaTrobe University.

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Conclusion

LaTrobe’s S/4HANA implementation is one of the more credible of the S/4HANA case studies. Although the timeline of 40 weeks is indeed on the short side, this was most likely a straightforward implementation of a single module of S/4HANA Finance. Yet, a complication would have been the required integration to ECC MM.

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