ManufacturingSAP S/4HANA Global Rollout for a Multinational Manufacturer
Delivering SAP S/4HANA across 22 countries in 18 months for an FTSE 100 manufacturer — on time, 4% under budget, with Finance, Supply Chain, Procurement, and Manufacturing modules live globally.
Client
Confidential — FTSE 100 Manufacturer
Expertise
Programme OutcomesResults at a glance
22
Countries delivered
Full S/4HANA global rollout
4%
Under budget
Saving of ~£2.8M vs baseline
43M
Data records
Migrated with validation
31%
Inventory visibility
Global improvement post-go-live
The ChallengeA multi-country ERP transformation with no margin for delay
The client — a FTSE 100 manufacturer operating across 22 countries — had been running a fragmented ERP landscape for over a decade: a mix of SAP ECC, legacy JD Edwards instances, and multiple custom-built finance systems. Business acquisitions had accelerated the complexity, and a strategic decision was made to standardise on SAP S/4HANA globally.
The programme faced three acute constraints. First, financial year-end obligations in multiple jurisdictions created hard go-live windows across four phases. Second, the legacy ECC landscape held 15+ years of master data requiring cleansing and migration. Third, the programme had to run alongside normal business operations — factory floors could not stop, and supply chain continuity was non-negotiable.
BrezQ was selected as the SAP programme delivery partner, responsible for the full programme office, all SAP functional workstreams, data migration, and change management across all 22 countries.
The BrezQ ApproachA phased global rollout with regional delivery hubs
BrezQ structured the programme into four release phases aligned to the client's financial year calendar — North America first, then Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, and finally emerging markets. A regional delivery hub model was established, with BrezQ senior consultants embedded in each hub supported by BrezQ engineers in India, Poland, and Singapore.
Data migration was the programme's highest-risk workstream. BrezQ's data engineering team built a dedicated migration factory — running 14 data cleansing and migration sprints over 12 months, processing 43 million master data records across vendor, customer, material, and financial data. Every migration was executed in a dedicated S/4HANA sandbox before production cutover.
Change management was run as a parallel workstream from programme day one — with a BrezQ Change Lead in each country, a train-the-trainer programme for 2,200 end users, and a hypercare support model for 90 days post-go-live in each phase.
Technologies Deployed
The OutcomeOn time across all 22 countries — 4% under approved budget
All four release phases were delivered on time, with every country live on SAP S/4HANA by month 18. Not a single financial year-end obligation was missed. The final phase — covering six emerging market countries — was completed three weeks ahead of the planned schedule.
The programme was delivered 4% under the approved budget — a saving of approximately £2.8M against the original programme baseline. The budget variance was driven by BrezQ's delivery accelerators: reusable SAP configuration templates, automated test execution, and a streamlined data migration framework that reduced manual effort by 40%.
Post-go-live, inventory visibility improved by 31% globally and period-close cycle time reduced from 8 days to 3 days across all finance entities. The programme received the client's internal CEO Award for programme delivery excellence.
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