'Talk of agile development is not going to get a multimillion-dollar investment approved'

Mukul Agrawal, Director of Technology at VistaPrint discusses how best to plan for transformation

How did a global business which processes vast volumes of small transactions transform their core business processes?

VistaPrint is a long-established provider of digital print and marketing solutions to SMEs and consumers. It is $2 billion company with an average order value of $35 - $40. That's a lot of transactions and according to Mukul Agrawal, Director of Technology, SAP ECC was struggling to cope with it as far back as 2016.

"SAP has always been considered the elephant in the room," he says. "It is the mammoth application that runs several critical business operations. At that time we had a three-week release cycle. The reporting database was also huge. I couldn't run a report on ETL for revenue line items per month. We had to summarise that report, summarise the data in the backend, take that data to an external SQL database, do ETL processing there and even then, give only a summarised view."

It didn't end there.

"The ticketing system, risk mitigation and change management capabilities were all lacking, " Agrawal says. "My goals were to make it more agile, reduce the time to market for my customers, and improve the feedback."

However, at this point the company had some work to do before it could even think about migrating to S/4HANA.

"The biggest concern was how we identify the risks in order that we could prepare for it. We started looking at the tools available. One of them was ActiveControl from Basis Technologies. The other one is JIRA. These could be implemented even in our old version of SAP. It was a quite a long journey, breaking things down into smaller increments so we could get to a point where we can talk about system transformation. After having addressed process changes, behaviour changes and responsibilities we started building a case around SAP transformation in 2019."

Selling transformation

At the recent Computing IT Leaders Summit there was considerable discussion on how the roles of CIOs and CTOs has evolved, and of how people in these roles need to use the language of strategy, business and numbers to translate technology into stories that CFOs can appreciate. Tech leaders have to be storytellers if they want their projects to prove transformative.

Agrawal agrees.

"Talking about agile development is not going to get a multimillion-dollar investment approved," he says. "There were lots of business challenges that we wanted to solve. Some of our fiscal closing processes for example which have to be run at month and quarter end were taking eight to ten hours. This now takes around 15 minutes."

Another sellable benefit was the fact that S/4HANA standardises the process for a global company and eliminates offline reporting.

"We've automated a lot of things," Agrawal continues. "We used to do over 250 tax reports on every month. It took one person one week after the fiscal year close just run the reports and give it to different tax teams. Now that task it takes about three hours. It's automated when the close completes, one checkbox and all 250 reports are run and delivered on an email to all users who needs them."

Being able to communicate these benefits in language that CFOs can understand was a key part of laying the groundwork for such a successful project. In addition to Agrawal's 15 years of technology leadership, he also brings a strong business awareness to the table.

"I'm a master's in accounting and in business administration so that does help me to look at our financials with a different perspective. I say we should act like the owner of the business. You have to be careful when you invest and know how you're going to use that investment to solve more business problems, minimise costs and improve efficiencies."

Delivering lower TCO and a single truth

The migration effectively began in September 2019 with a go live date of April 2020. Seven months was not long for a project involving a mission critical global system with approximately 1400 users, database migration and upgrade, transition from on premise to third party datacentre, application upgrades and all that this entails.

However, all the painstaking assessment and planning paid off. The customer experience (and Agrawal defines customers as internal users as well as the external end users) is much improved now finance, supply chain, sales and analytics (the last of which enabled the retiring of multiple third-party analytics packages) have all migrated to S/4HANA. Agrawal has transitioned VistaPrint to the much-vaunted single version of the truth - and it's a truth available in a fraction of the time it used to take.

"We eliminated a lot of offline systems, SQL databases, external reporting systems, that was all brought into S/4HANA. Because the system's just more powerful we can run those reports directly. TCO is lower because we do not have those external systems anymore. I'm not paying for AWS compute power for those systems. I do not need SQL developers on my team anymore, because it's all on the same system."

It's a success story, but Agrawal makes the point that without the process that was undertaken back in 2016, this transition may not have been as smooth and effective.

"Agile transformation, daily deployment cycles, none of these things would have been possible if we did not get control in 2016. Active Control had a big part to play in risk mitigation because changes were still happening in ECC while we were implementing S/4HANA. All the change management or the changes moving from one landscape with landscape automatically is all ActiveControl running in the background."

Trevor Ticehurst, CCO of Basis Technologies expands on the role of Active Control in risk mitigation for migration.

"A key challenge businesses face when migrating SAP from ECC to S/4HANA is dual maintenance - managing change in the ECC landscape to keep operations running while implementing the new landscape in parallel. Future change should not inhibit current innovation. This is one of the pain points that ActiveControl helped VistaPrint overcome by automating change management across both ecosystems. By reducing the manual effort required and alleviating external audit pressures, Mukul and his team are able to focus on the value-add components of the company's digital transformation journey, without fears of operational disruption."