How Kingspan cut SAP manual change management effort by 50% with ActiveControl
Overview
Embracing change with confidence
Kingspan is the global leader in high performance insulation and building envelopes and operates more than 100 manufacturing facilities in over 70 countries. They are a long-standing user of SAP and chose to do a greenfield S/4HANA implementation for one of their local SAP landscapes with the goal of delivering value to customers faster. Part of the motivation for adopting S/4HANA early was to be able to apply update packs and enable new features more quickly.
Challenges
Excessive manual effort
Too many production issues
Slow, ‘painful’ S/4HANA upgrades
Solution
ActiveControl helped to move away from spreadsheets and email chains
Business as usual (BAU) change and future S/4HANA upgrade packs can now be implemented more quickly and safely
More time for team to focus on value-adding work
Results
50% reduction in change management effort
Change delivered to production 2x faster
Significant time saved
Customer testimonial
Powering innovation faster in an SAP S/4HANA landscape with Basis Technologies
Kingspan used ActiveControl to gain greater control and visibility of SAP change
Executive Summary
Kingspan adopted automation from Basis Technologies to deliver innovation faster in a greenfield SAP S/4HANA landscape, and implement upgrades safely and efficiently.
The Challenge
Kingspan employs advanced manufacturing technology throughout its business and needed an equally advanced IT solution to support its operations in the CEER region, based in the Czech Republic.
Having selected SAP S/4HANA, the company needed to deliver changes faster and more efficiently to support new processes and workflows.
Meanwhile, the rollout of regular S/4 upgrades – vital if the company is to benefit from the latest functionality – was proving to be more challenging than expected.
The Solution
Kingspan selected ActiveControl from Basis Technologies to help them move away from the spreadsheets and email chains associated with manual change control.
Before Kingspan adopted ActiveControl, service tickets, spreadsheets and email chains were the foundation of the change process – a disconnected approach that did enable bi-weekly production deployments, but only at the expense of other valuable work.
Transport management simply took too much time and effort, even outside of normal working hours.
ActiveControl’s advanced automation has enabled Kingspan to remove as much as fifty percent of manual effort through features like automated transport deployment, versatile approval workflows and automatic notifications.
As a result, deployment frequency has increased to four times per week despite significantly less human involvement.
The Result
Thanks to ActiveControl, Kingspan are able to deliver faster, safer SAP change into their S/4HANA systems on a more frequent basis.
Manual effort has been dramatically reduced, visibility has greatly increased and a significant amount of time has been released, allowing the team to focus on the tasks that add most value.
Perhaps most important of all to the business, major production incidents have been all but eliminated.
ActiveControl’s advanced automation also gives Kingspan more flexibility in the design of their S/4HANA landscape by making a multi-track approach a realistic possibility. That flexibility provides a platform to accelerate future S/4HANA upgrades so that business users can benefit from the latest functionality as soon as possible.
