Moët Hennessy: A Smart Brownfield Approach to SAP S/4HANA Adoption

SAP S/4HANA is a powerful, cloud-based ERP solution. Discover how Moët Hennessy has employed a "smart brownfield" approach in their move to S/4HANA while maintaining operational efficiency.

Adopting a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution can empower your organization, optimizing operations today while preparing you for tomorrow. Moving from your on-prem ERP to the cloud, however, is not something that can happen overnight.

One major challenge is the amount of time and effort you have put in to building up, customizing, and optimizing your ERP landscape. After fine-tuning your ERP to support your business, completely replacing it with a new solution can feel a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. At the same time, if you fail to take advantage of the technical innovation offered by S/4HANA, you risk losing your competitive edge.

What you need is a middle-ground option that allows you to keep the best of your current setup and still take advantage of the power of SAP S/4HANA. Our customer, Moët Hennessy leveraged a "smart brownfield" approach to get the best of both worlds.

To find out more about how SAP LeanIX empowered Moët Hennessy to move to SAP S/4HANA while maintaining operational continuity, check out the recording of our joint webinar: 

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR: Moët Hennessy Leverages Enterprise Architecture For SAP S/4HANA Transformation

The Power Of SAP S/4HANA

Your ERP is among the most vital pieces of technology you own. It's not going too far to say that your business runs on it.

A best-of-breed ERP solution ensures that the digital and physical sides of your organization work in synergy. In a digital market, this is essential, and the better your ERP solution, the better your ability to compete and leverage innovative technology.

SAP S/4HANA is a next-generation ERP tool that can launch your operations into the modern age. It offers:

• functionality based on current best practice
• continuous innovation opportunities
• fast time to value
• security and compliance
• automatic and continual updates
• easy integration and scalability

In addition, S/4HANA is cloud-based. This supports cost reduction and scalability, as well as preparing the tool to work with innovative new technology like artificial intelligence (AI).

What's more, SAP will be retiring its legacy ERP Central Component (ECC) software at the end of 2027, so current users are on a countdown to make the move to SAP S/4HANA.

Starting Fresh With SAP S/4HANA

Moving to SAP S/4HANA from SAP ECC offers significant benefits. Realizing these benefits means approaching the move thoughtfully and systematically.

Given the centrality of ERP systems to business operations, you can't simply turn off one solution and turn on another. Data migration aside, there's the fine tuning mentioned above. You need to recreate the custom capabilities and configurations from the old system if you simply want to maintain operations at the current level. Anything less than that invites disaster.

In 1999, confectionary company Hershey's implemented an ERP transformation poorly and, as a result, failed to fulfill US $100 million in orders, dropped 19% in profits for the quarter, and saw 8% reduction in share value. This illustrates the impact that making the wrong choices about ERP transformation can have.

READ: ERP Transformation - 5 Companies That Waited Too Long

Even if you make the move without hiccups, the new ERP is, well, new. Your employees will need to learn new ways of doing things. This process takes time and means overall performance and efficiency may decline before it improves. 

So how do you avoid potential pitfalls when making the move?  The experience of our customer, Moët Hennessy, illustrates one way to do that.

Moët Hennessy's Smart Brownfield Alternative

Moët Hennessy used SAP LeanIX to plan their transformation to SAP S/4HANA. The key to their success was taking a "smart brownfield" approach.

As the wines and spirits division of LVMH, Moët Hennessy's value chain is long, running from the vineyard to retailers around the world. To improve logistics across this complex network, Moët decided to migrate their two legacy instances of SAP ECC to a single instance of S/4HANA.

READ: ERP Transformation: 6 Tips From Moët Hennessy

Rather than disrupting their operations with a "greenfield" approach, that is, treating SAP S/4HANA like a new ERP that had to be stood up from scratch, Moët chose to use a "brownfield" approach and migrate their existing SAP workflows and systems to S/4HANA before switching over. 

Simply recreating their old ERP in the new ERP, without making any changes, would not have been a wise investment, of course. Inefficiency in the cloud is not an improvement over inefficiency on prem. To ensure that the new ERP set them up for success into the future, Moët used the move as an opportunity to enhance their master data and build a clean core.

This "smart brownfield" approach avoids the potential disruptions of a greenfield ERP transformation, while maintaining the best of your current ERP setup. Moët believes this is the best way to transform, in part because, by focusing on continuity in performance, I puts users and customers first.

By purging historical data and improving information and processes across their ERP landscape as they migrated, Moët is creating an optimal ERP landscape running on  best-of-breed software. Because it relies heavily on the existing structure of your ERP, a brownfield approach calls for reliable insight into that structure, which is where SAP LeanIX comes in.

How SAP LeanIX Powers Moët's Transformation

A "smart brownfield" ERP transformation to SAP S/4HANA depends on a solid understanding of the dependencies and capabilities in your existing landscape. You must also unify this understanding with your vision for the future state of your ERP.  This will allow you to make informed decisions regarding what you want to retain, what you want to improve and change, and how you want to go about making the move.

SAP LeanIX empowers you to visualize your ERP estate, including all the systems and components it interacts with and depends on, and create a detailed roadmap for your move to S/4HANA. 

To find out more about how SAP LeanIX empowered Moët Hennessy to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA while maintaining operational continuity, check out the recording of our joint webinar:

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR: Moët Hennessy Leverages Enterprise Architecture For SAP S/4HANA Transformation