The New York Life S/4HANA Case Study

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • New York Life’s S/4HANA Implementation
  • Where Did Budgeting and Planning Occur in S/4HANA?
  • Implementing S/4HANA for Its Ledger?

Introduction

New York Life is an insurance company. I struggled with even including them in the list of public implementation announcements of the different case studies.

Our References for This Article

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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. 
  • First, there is no public announcement of New York Life going live on S/4HANA. This is something that New York Life, SAP, and Deloitte all would have wanted as it would have provided positive press for each of the companies.
  • Representatives from New York Life made some strange statements regarding their S/4HANA implementation, one being that what had been transferred to S/4HANA was the “ledger.”
  • This, combined with all information about this project, has dried up, making one question what happened to the New York Life S/4HANA implementation.
  • Instead, we have had the announcements that New York Life selected S/4HANA. Then, we learned in an article on TechTarget that New York Life made some progress with S/4HANA on May 18, 2016. In this article, Raymond Carney, as VP at New York Life, proposed that New York Life uses S/4HANA for the following:

Where Did Budgeting and Planning Occur in S/4HANA?

“Carney: The main thing that’s on S/4HANA is our ledger, our budget, and planning system, BPC [business planning and consolidation], and our reporting, which comes in [SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office]. By having that as an integrated system, it makes our reporting easy, [and] it makes it that when we’re doing budgeting, it’s right in line with how the actuals are produced.”

The problem with this quotation is that S/4HANA is not a budget and planning system. And right after this statement, Carney transitions into BPC. BPC is a budget and planning system. So, it appears as if budget and planning are performed at New York Life by BPC and not by S/4HANA.

Next, in the same sentence, Carney discusses how New York Life leveraged Business Objects. Business Objects is also not S/4HANA. Therefore, at least from this quote, the use of S/4HANA seems to be for the ledger. However, using the ledger would not be a reason to implement the S/4HANA system.

Carney’s comments show tell-tale signs of the type of comment that would be made by someone who is obscuring how much S/4HANA is being used.

In another comment from a different article from TechTarget, Carney again points to the ledger.

“We wanted to move our finance and accounting role to more of a strategist role, and to do that we needed to change our platform,” Carney said. “Our ledger was SAP ledger that we put in in 1999, so when we started the project a couple of years ago, it was 15 years old.”

“The system worked, Carney explained, but it had spawned a culture of homegrown databases with many disparities between different business units, eventually growing to 15,000 general ledger accounts and more than 5,000 profit centers. “We looked around at the time and decided that Simple Finance was the way to go,” he said.”

“The software, since renamed S/4HANA Finance, provided a foundation for simplifying all these processes and streamlining the accounts and profit centers, paring down to around 3,500 accounts. Once this intensive foundational work is done, Carney said that the company could begin to transform the work that’s done by the finance professionals.”

Implementing S/4HANA for Its Ledger?

It should be observed that S/4HANA cannot be justified by using just the finance module and is even harder to justify when only a small component of the finance module is used. However, this is essentially what Carney proposes in his explanations of the New York Life S/4HANA “implementation.”

I discussed the New York Life case study with a contact who had seen Carney present at an SAP conference. According to the contract, Carney was evasive about what had been implemented, preferring to talk highly about S/4HANA benefits. In that presentation, Carney stated that SAP was very good at flying consultants from many different locations to support the go-live, which was not encouraging to the audience. It brought up the obvious question as to why this was necessary.

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Conclusion

It isn’t easy to see the New York Life S/4HANA case study as an actual implementation. After 2016, the information coming from this implementation essentially dies, and this is combined with the fact that the explanation provided by New York Life regarding its implementation is hazy and generally does not make any sense. If New York Life decides to assume the cost of implementing S/4HANA to improve its ledger, New York Life needs to get a new decision-maker team. Carney also does not explain why the ledger could not have been consolidated in ECC and why S/4HANA was necessary.

If New York Life decides to assume the cost of implementing S/4HANA to improve its ledger, New York Life needs to get a new decision-maker team. Carney also does not explain why the ledger could not have been consolidated in ECC and why S/4HANA was necessary.

It is quite possible that New York Life found out more information about S/4HANA and its completeness as the project progressed, and they decided to cut their losses and postpone future implementation. This has happened in the private case studies that I have collected. But something at the New York Life S/4HANA implementation does not add up.

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