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0 OCT NOV DEC 2012 insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com
In today’s booming mobile environment, Vodafone
Group — a business that has mobility hardwired into
its DNA — considers itself fortunate to be in the right
industry at the right time, with the right products and
strategy. The business has seen incredible growth since its
avant-garde beginnings 27 years ago. By revenue, it is the larg-
est mobile service provider in the world, and it services almost
400 million customers across Europe, the US, Africa, and Asia.
London-based Vodafone grew quickly in its various mar-
kets by successfully establishing local operating companies
that catered products and services to the local market’s needs.
However, the business lacked common practices, centralized
operations, and data sharing between operating companies.
For Vodafone to continue to grow at such a robust pace, the
company needed to function more like a single entity and less
like a network of individual businesses.
And a major business transformation has done that. In
the next phase of transformation, the company plans to use
mobility to continue its growth strategy.
“Given our business, we’d like to see about 80% of our
internal transactions happening on a mobile device,” says
Niall O’Sullivan, Global Finance Transformation Director
at Vodafone. “We are obsessed with operating with speed,
simplicity, and trust. With this transformation completed, I
believe that mobility can help really drive speed and simplicity
in everything we do.”
Vodafone employees have been using mobile apps on their
BlackBerry devices and a mobile intranet for years. “We always
focused on mobile, but now we are working on bringing mo-
bility to enterprise applications,” says O’Sullivan. “For example,
we want our employees to be able to approve leave requests
or expense reports while traveling — in a secure, quick, and
easy-to-use mobile app — instead of clicking on the internet
and using office time for those tasks.”
Transformation Strengthens the CoreIn 2006, a group of Vodafone executives went to the
company’s board with a plan for a business transformation
Vodafone Walks the Talk
Going Mobile with One of the World’s Biggest SAP ERP Implementationsby David Hannon, Senior Features Editor
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This article appeared in the OCT NOV DEC 2012 issue of insiderPROFILES (http://insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com) and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.
processes locally with the help of a
systems integrator and local resources.
The technology platform that would
underpin this transformation would
be an SAP ERP system — designed to
facilitate the sharing of information
and drive common processes. This will
now be combined with the power of
Sybase Unwired Platform. O’Sullivan
hopes this mixture of technology will
make access to Vodafone’s core enter-
prise systems for the 63,000 SAP users
as easy as shopping online at Amazon
and eBay or using a mobile app on an
iPhone or Android device.
“Being on one global platform
for finance, HR, and the supply
chain would speed up our business
processes and make life simpler and
better for our employees — even those
who don’t access the SAP system on a
daily basis and might only use it every
few weeks to enter a leave request,”
says O’Sullivan. “The key is to engage
more of these occasional SAP users and
get them interacting with the system
on their mobile device.”
Starting with ProcurementHow does a business begin its journey
undertaking one of the biggest SAP
ERP implementations in the world?
With a year of process design and fine-
tuning completed, Vodafone targeted
procurement as the first business pro-
cess for transformation using the new
SAP ERP system. Like many decentral-
ized companies spread across a wide
geography, Vodafone wanted to better
leverage its massive spend with its ma-
terial and service suppliers. By tackling
procurement early on, the transforma-
tion project could gain ROI quickly and
win further support internally.
But rather than establish a cen-
tralized procurement department,
Vodafone created a procurement com-
pany that is based in Luxembourg and
operates on the centralized SAP plat-
form. As O’Sullivan explains, today,
the Vodafone Procurement Company
signs the contracts with suppliers and
buys goods or services on behalf of the
individual Vodafone businesses. The
unique structure ensures the majority
of the company’s spend goes through
the central organization. Suppliers can
better see and plan their volumes with
Vodafone because they’re selling to
one company instead of to many.
Globetrotting: Technology RolloutsWith the new procurement company
up and running on the SAP system,
Vodafone took on its next major trans-
formation step: create a centralized
shared services organization and bring
it onto the SAP ERP system. Vodafone
selected Budapest, Hungary as the loca-
tion and built an entire shared services
organization from scratch — including
purchasing a new office building and
hiring staff — while simultaneously
implementing SAP ERP.
“This was the first time we brought in
shared services, so getting Hungary up
and running was a huge deal for us, es-
pecially because we were still designing
the SAP ERP system while implement-
ing it,” O’Sullivan says. The company
has since established two more shared
services organizations in India and all
are running smoothly on SAP ERP.
After the pilot implementation in
Hungary, Vodafone chose to introduce
the operating company in Germany to
the new processes and brought it onto
the SAP platform. As Vodafone’s largest
market, the project team felt this com-
pany would present the biggest trans-
formation challenge. “Germany could
not go wrong,” says O’Sullivan. “We had
to make sure the system worked prop-
erly, so we did a tremendous amount
of testing and made all the necessary
modifications before we went live.”
From there, the project team brought
a long list of operating companies on-
line, prioritizing the implementations
based on each operating company’s
size, complexity, and appetite for
change. “The early rollouts are difficult
and you need all the support you can
From the start of the initiative, Vodafone management wanted to instill the idea that the project was a business transforma-tion underpinned by an ERP implementa-tion and not an ERP implementation that would change local business processes. To help drive that message home, the board chose O’Sullivan, a former CFO of an operating company, to lead the project because he came not from IT, but from the business side. “We wanted to be sure everyone under-stood from the beginning this was a busi-ness transformation,” he says. “And we learned you need to remind people of that at every stage of the project.” A full year before the ERP implementa-tion began, all of the operating compa-nies’ department heads of finance, supply chain, and human resources attended a series of workshops in London to map out common, global processes in those key areas. O’Sullivan says the goals of those workshops were to agree on core concepts and gain buy-in from the businesses for proposed changes. Once the processes were firmly estab-lished, Vodafone took another step to en-sure that they would be implemented as designed, and that the business leaders maintained control over the processes after the ERP implementation began. That step included creating the Vodafone Global Design Authority, a committee made up of key senior business leaders across the organization responsible for owning the processes. Any time a person or group sug-gested a change to one of the processes (which included the IT organization during the ERP implementation), the Global De-sign Authority had to approve the change.
Setting the Stage: A Business-Led Project
aimed at creating a centralized shared services
organization and a set of common processes
in finance, human resources, and the supply
chain for all of its operating companies. The
implementation plan called for a core proj-
ect team to visit each of the individual oper-
ating companies and implement these new
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get,” O’Sullivan says. “Early successes
are vital to keep the momentum and
support of the executive team.”
Each operating company brought its
own unique challenges and demands,
and no two rollouts were exactly the
same. Many of the companies had
grown very quickly, and chose numer-
ous different legacy systems based on
local requirements or competitive
reasons. Challenges usually involved
striking a balance between time, qual-
ity, and cost — move too quickly and
quality will suffer, which increases
costs in the long run; focus too much
on quality, though, and the project
will slow to a crawl while costs spiral.
Making People a PriorityIn addition to which legacy systems
were currently in place, O’Sullivan
says there were two major personnel
factors that determined how success-
ful a rollout would be: the skills of
the local project team and the will-
ingness of the local organization to
accept change.
Vodafone’s primary systems inte-
gration partner, Accenture, filled in
skills gaps when needed and assisted
with change management in the
local markets. Gradually, the project
team — including Vodafone internal
staffers and the Accenture experts —
learned to assess early on how to best
allocate resources in a specific project.
For example, if members of an oper-
ating company weren’t present for
the project kickoff meeting, or they
were there but disinterested, the proj-
ect team knew that company would
require more attention.
“If they didn’t show up to the kick-
off meeting, it was a pretty clear sign
Objective: Standardize business processes, leverage best practices across a diversified business portfolio, and eventually deliver 80% of transactions through mobile devices
Solution: Created a global shared services organization, all underpinned by a single instance of SAP ERP, and rolled out mobile apps internally, supported by Sybase Unwired Platform
Benefits: Better visibility and collaboration across business units, more users accessing the enterprise system, improved spend leverage and procurement savings, and faster financial reporting
At a Glance
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there would be some pushback,”
O’Sullivan says. “Or if their comments
at the meeting were negative or
they had very few questions, it dem-
onstrated they were not that engaged
in the project.”
At the same time, the project team
had to be sensitive to local trends
occurring during the rollouts. For
example, if an operating company
resided in a country experiencing a
downturned economy, the personnel
there may have mixed feelings toward
the rollout. Introducing a dramatic
business and technology change could
be embraced by some as a way to
improve their situation, but eyed by
others as an additional distraction
during a very stressful time.
“We learned the success of these
projects depended on the people
involved even more than we realized,”
O’Sullivan says. “That includes the
strength of the core team, the exper-
tise from the systems integrator, and
a strong local team at the operating
companies. It’s imperative that the
various teams have the right skills
and work seamlessly together in the
local projects.”
The Latest Benefits and Initial Mobile AppsVodafone is now finishing the rollout
with its remaining operating compa-
nies and beginning to loop back to the
earliest implementations to deploy
IT functionality updates and make
improvements based on what it has
learned in the process. For example,
O’Sullivan says the team learned a lot
about usability based on employee
testing and feedback over the course
of the project, and is enhancing the
interfaces for the early rollouts to be
more user-friendly.
The business has also started to
roll out some initial enterprise apps
for mobile devices. The first mobile
app was a travel and expense report-
ing app. “Employees can take a photo
of their receipts and get paid without
using any paper, and they can request
or approve leave requests on their
phones all at one time,” O’Sullivan says.
So far, Vodafone has signed up for
four applications, with more to come.
“We think these mobile apps will be
a major advantage in driving compli-
ance, reducing the level of frustration
in the usage, and reducing the level
of resistance to the actual processes
themselves,” he says. “We want to im-
plement as many apps as quickly as we
can and get as many users as possible
to have the vast majority of their inter-
action with the system on their phone.”
But the potential goes much deeper
than that, according to O’Sullivan. “Be-
cause mobility provides easy access for
employees who don’t typically engage
with the SAP systems, more employees
are using the system,” he says. “And the
more users we have on the system, the
greater the return on investment.”
Vodafone’s business transformation
project is producing real results both
in terms of cost savings and business
efficiency. At a strategic level, the ben-
efits of getting the various operating
companies to think more uniformly
has produced less tangible, but equally
important benefits. “This was the first
time we introduced the shared ser-
vices concept in this company, and the
change in thinking that idea brings is
significant,” says O’Sullivan. From an IT
perspective, the support and adminis-
tration of one single centralized system
is much more efficient than supporting
many local systems.
When O’Sullivan looks back on
the scope of Vodafone’s transforma-
tion, he’s proud of what the team has
accomplished. “We affected tremen-
dous change across the organization.
We established and implemented com-
mon supply chain, HR, and finance
processes that now work in every
market across the business. And the
underlying technology that pins it all
together is the common ERP system.”
Vodafone can now show its custom-
ers how the business itself is working
internally with speed, simplicity, and
trust.
Headquarters: London, England
Industry: Mobile phone service provider
Employees: 86,400
Revenue: $72.6 billion (£46.6 billion) (NASDAq: VOD)
Company details:• More than 404 million customers in 30
countries across five continents • Services include voice, messaging, data,
and fixed broadband• Made the first ever mobile call on
January 1, 1985 • Owns 45% share in Verizon Wireless in
the US• Embarked on a finance, supply chain,
and HR transformation in 2006• Current business strategy focuses
on four key areas: data services, emerging markets, enterprise and total communications, and new services
SAP solutions:• SAP ERP • SAP ERP HCM • SAP SCM
“We are obsessed with operating with speed, simplicity, and trust. With this transformation completed, I believe that mobility can help really drive speed and simplicity in everything we do.”— Niall O’Sullivan, Global Finance
Transformation Director, Vodafone
Company SnapshotVodafone Group
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