The Ballance Agri-Nutrients S/4HANA Case Study

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

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

Introduction

Ballance Agri-Nutrients is a provider of agricultural products such as fertilizers, trace elements, and other agricultural soil products and animal nutrient products. Potash Sulphur would be a typical product they offer.

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. 

Ballance Agri-Nutrients Strong Endorsement of S/4HANA

Ballance Agri-Nutrients (BAN) is based in New Zealand. BAN has statements that strongly endorse S/4HANA, as the following quotation can attest.

“Management sales reporting has decreased from two hours to 30 minutes, while key business processes have become 75 per cent quicker. In some cases, delivering reports on a year’s worth of data is taking less than a second.

“We understood the power of real-time data, and the need to get this into the hands of our employees,” said Richard Hopkins, CFO, Ballance Agri-Nutrients. “With SAP S/4HANA our people are more productive. They have access to the right tools and information at the right time, enabling them to serve our customers with confidence.

“The speed at which we are now able to extract insights from our data has advanced our reporting capabilities significantly. The team now has more time to focus on the job at hand, and already our month end is easier and quicker to complete thanks to the SAP S/4HANA Finance solution. There is no longer even time to go and get a coffee when waiting for a report to process,” said Hopkins.”

Outside of these endorsements, there is very little published information about the BAN go live.

What Was Implemented?

BAN has roughly $900 million in revenues and approximately 700 workers. So, BAN is a substantial company, but it was not S/4HANA Enterprise Management (EM) implemented, but S/4HANA Finance. Finance is ostensibly the only completed module as part of S/4HANA at the time of implementation, and we get varying reports as to how complete the module actually is. It appears that BAN implemented S/4HANA Finance with eyes on S4HANA EM as being the primary justifier of using S/4HANA as the following quotation from BAN’s implementing partner attests:

“As a major benefit of S/4HANA, SAP touts the ability for enterprises to “reimagine business processes.” Ballance has started on this journey and foresee S/4 Logistics (the next module off the block) as a real game-changer for their business. While the simplified data model and elements like Fiori were the first step forward for Ballance’s finance users, the new elements of S/4 Logistics will provide the impetus for the company to revolutionize their major business processes.” – Soltius

The problem with this is that these areas of S/4HANA are still not complete. It is the case that BAN was oversold when these parts of S/4HANA would be complete as BAN made their decision to move to S/4HANA some time ago, SAP missed its deadlines on the rest of the S/4HANA suite. The issues of the overall S/4HANA EM suite’s timelines are covered in the article Why the Overall S/4HANA Suite is Not Yet Released. Evidence for S/4HANA has missed its deadlines is found in the article Evidence that S/4HANA Suite Missed its Release Deadlines.

There is nothing published regarding how BAN feels about this turn of events.

“We were happy to find that very few bug fixes were required during the implementation, especially given how new the 1503 release was at the time of implementation. The good news is, SAP haven’t sacrificed the structural integrity for which they are so famous. The solution is sound, and there were very few surprises, regarding errors and bugs, during the implementation.”

This is an endorsement of S/4HANA Finance only, as that was the scope of the BAN implementation.

This S/4HANA implementation went live in June 2016.

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Conclusion

BAN’s endorsement of S/4HANA is ringing. But some of the statements about the implementation from BAN cannot be right from our research into S/4HANA. This is, however, one of the few credible S/4HANA implementation case studies.

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