Sonepar

Customer profile  

Sonepar is a family-owned wholesaler with 45,000 employees in 40 countries around the world, headquartered in Paris. Sonepar has a very ambitious agenda to become a more data-driven organization. One of the ambitions is to create a “single source of truth” for the management of all supplier and product data, including, for example, ETIM, media and logistics data.

Within this agenda there was a need at Sonepar Germany to improve the management of supplier and product master data. The Sonepar operation in Germany has 5,000+ employees in 199 locations and a turnover of 3.2 billion euros.

• Focus on Sonepar Germany
• Improve product master data management
• Ambition to become a data-driven organization

Customer case  

For 25 years, Sonepar Germany has been successfully running in-house developed applications for master data management (MDM) and ERP, based on an Oracle database. Technical knowledge and support for these applications is gradually decreasing as requirements are increasing. That is why it was decided to implement two state-of-the-art enterprise SaaS solutions. SAP 4HANA was chosen for the ERP application. STEP replaces the legacy OLAV application for supplier and product MDM.

Squadra has been selected for project management, solution design and actual implementation for STEP.

• Implementing two SaaS solutions
• SAP 4HANA and STEP selected
• Solution design and implementation

The challenge  

The implementations of SAP 4HANA and STEP run parallel. For project management reasons, the STEP MDM solution has a phased implementation.

Phase 1: Master data of all 15,000 suppliers and 12,000 discount groups are managed in STEP. There will be one integration with the old OLAV application. OLAV only serves to distribute the supplier data to other systems. The product master data is still managed in OLAV.

Phase 2: Master Data for all +500,000 products are added to STEP and distributed to other systems via OLAV.

Phase 3: The integration between STEP and SAP via an integration layer is expanded and OLAV disappears from the system landscape.

• Parallel implementation 4HANA and STEP
• Data validations for OLAV and STEP
• Phased implementation for STEP

Phase 1 challenges  

This phase has some specific challenges. Data validations for SAP and OLAV must be verified and passed in STEP. Stage 1 does not contain any products, but a discount group has a reference to both a supplier and products. Discount groups have some complex validations, such as “a supplier can only be changed from type A to type B if there is no active discount group, and a discount group can only be deactivated if it has no active products”.

• Specific challenges phase 1
• Only discount groups included
• Discount groups with complex variations

The solution  

Squadra MDM gathered the requirements and use cases for the STEP solution. Based on a conceptual data model, Squadra MDM Factory built the solution within 4 months, including:

• Design and implementation of the technical data model
• Workflows and business logic for advanced data validations
• User-friendly web user interface, in consultation with business key users
• API based outbound integration with OLAV
• Functional testing of all components

After the completion of the User Acceptance Test, Squadra also took care of the initial load of OLAV data in STEP.

• Solution based on conceptual mode
• Built within 4 months
• Initial transformation from OLAV to STEP

Collaboration  

Throughout the project, the Squadra MDM Factory team worked closely with the solution architect, Sonepar IT team and business users to refine requirements and evaluate change requests. The development team has applied agile methods to define user stories and tasks, plan work, monitor progress, and ensure work is tested and approved. The agile approach enabled the team to deal quickly and adequately with additional requirements and change requests.

A robust business process has been designed together with the users to ensure that all validations between suppliers, discount groups and products are consistent and respected across all systems.

• Close cooperation with Sonepar IT team
• Agile approach by the team
• The business process is designed

The result  

Sonepar Germany now manages the master data of suppliers and discount groups in STEP flawlessly. Data is now managed on a modern, secure and user-friendly platform. The approach and results for this project in Germany are shared within Sonepar as a use case to prepare a template for supplier master data management implementation in other countries. The ultimate goal is to create more standardized processes and tools, to reduce data sharing and consolidation efforts and open the door for further data enrichment.

• Modern, secure and user-friendly platform
• Template for implementation in other countries
• Aim to create more standardized tools