Despite the global COVID-19 pandemic, Refratechnik has successfully implemented SAP S/4HANA — SAP’s ERP software package that covers all of an organisation’s core activities — in full-scale at its Australian acquisition, Queensland Magnesia (QMAG).
Adding to the list of companies that have successfully migrated to SAP S/4HANA is QMAG, a fully integrated producer of magnesia products with mining and production in the Australian state of Queensland.
In February 2020, Germany-headquartered Refratechnik Group acquired the Australian magnesia producer to contribute to the expansion of its products and services in the industrial minerals sector.
Meanwhile, Refratechnik is a global network of companies, active in the refractory and industrial mineral business, employing over 1,700 employees at 27 locations worldwide. Expounding on the migration project between Refratechnik and QMAG, Silke Denecke, CFO of Refratechnik Holding GmbH, stated:
“As part of the contract negotiations, we had agreed to phase QMAG completely out of the seller’s existing ERP system by the end of 2020. So, technically speaking, we would have had enough time to implement the SAP solution on site in Australia.”
Denecke explained that they could not transfer QMAG’s existing ERP (enterprise resource planning) system called Pronto, specifically tailored to the mining industry in Australia, because it was integrated with the seller’s group IT landscape.
Refratechnik began developing a prototype for the Group’s transition to SAP S/4HANA in January 2020. The company had already implemented SAP Analytics Cloud and used it for analysis and planning in Munich as part of the initial phase.
Virtual Implementation of SAP’s ERP Software Solution
The implementation of SAP S/4HANA on an internal level should have been the second stage, as part of its original plan but the refractory technology provider opted to follow a different approach. Instead, it has selected QMAG as the first company within the Refratechnik Group to transition to SAP S/4HANA in full-scale.
However, due to the lockdowns imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole project team, which included internal SAP consultants and experienced key users from the companies’ numerous specialist units in Munich, Goettingen, and Duesseldorf, was forced to work from home.
Denecke further stated that the go-live and process analyses had to be done online, using the Microsoft Teams platform, in daily meetings between key users in Australia and the partner company. She explained:
“We didn’t know anything about SAP S/4HANA or the processes on site. Even this type of mine was new to us. We only had seven months to pull it off – everything from familiarising ourselves with SAP S/4HANA, capturing all the processes, conception, customising, training of colleagues, migration, and go-live – not to mention across different time zones.”
SAP S/4HANA Migration Project Reaps Outstanding Results
Although the pandemic situation complicated things for the internal SAP experts, key users, and QMAG’s Australian colleagues, the migration project reaped outstanding results. Denecke highlighted:
“We were able to deliver products without interruption post go-live, and performed our year-end closing after just one month with the new system. We can now calculate automatically to nine levels. A lot of manual tasks have been eliminated.”
Meanwhile, Renata Munzel, who was one of the two people in charge of the ERP implementation at Refratechnik, said that the new services and interfaces provided by SAP S/4HANA have simplified a great deal of things for the company. Fully built on the in-memory platform SAP HANA, the solution delivers a new generation of business applications and enterprise software for big data to help organisations run simple in an increasingly complex digital business environment.
Over the next three years, Refratechnik plans to gradually replace its outdated ERP systems with SAP S/4HANA across the rest of its 20-strong group of companies. It also intends to increase its investment in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in the future to improve its predictive planning and sales forecasting abilities.
Moreover, SAP’s ERP software system will also be implemented in the group’s operations in Germany this year, followed by either Canada or Asia.
