Digital@Fletcher – Digital Technology SAP S/4HANA

Fletcher Building is one of New Zealand’s most well-known home-building and construction companies. Founded in 1909, Fletcher Building has experienced significant expansion and now employs more than 14,500 people across multiple businesses in New Zealand, Australia, and the South Pacific.

Sysdoc were engaged to support Fletcher Building to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, bringing together multiple businesses within the Fletcher group under one standardised Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform and way of working. The main objectives of D@F were to:

• Standardise, simplify, and optimise business processes across business units 70%.
• Introduce a standardised global template with minimal customisation to accommodate business unit requirements.
• Reduce ERP software and independent applications.
• Improve data hygiene and quality.
• Build a solid core of data within an architecture that is best in class.
• Deliver a positive experience for the customer, employees, and Fletcher Building.

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Approach

In partnership with PwC, Sysdoc was responsible for providing process design, change management, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and learning and documentation.

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During the programme the following challenges were identfied:

• Having to combine a wide range of different businesses with different processes and systems into a single SAP platform.
• Forming the programme during Covid-19, which introduced challenges to the onboarding process. Sysdoc rapidly incorporated applications such as Miro and MS Teams to provide an engaging platform.
• Working with global business units and organisations in different time zones.
• Working with a complex, dynamic and large scale technology programme.

Process Key Deliverables from Sysdoc (our team of process, learning, change and testing experts) working with key stakeholders:

• Facilitated collaborative workshops with all the impacted business units to define SAP standard design and customisation needs.
• Designed the structure of the Process Blueprints ensuring they reflected the ‘as-built’ state, and the necessary improvements were made.
• Conducted workshops with the business units to gain a better understanding of their business requirements.
• Created and maintained a Business Process Master List (BPML) with target state processes.

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Change Management Key Deliverables from our team:

• Created a standardised approach across all change management activities.
• Developed a comprehensive communication plan, with templates to show standard communication and engagement activities required throughout the project.
• Deployed all approach documents, templates and support guides in a SharePoint site, specific for each business unit.
• Established a rigorous change impact assessment process to detail impacts at BPML level 3.

Testing Key Deliverables to ensure our solution was fit for purpose, we:

• Supervised end-to-end business process testing to identify and ensure resolution of any interdependency issues.
• Oversaw final UAT testing, ensuring no defects were identified that could impact business operations.
• Completed initial System Integration Testing (SIT) of multiple business scenarios, and ensured issues and defects were resolved prior to the business units completing formal SIT testing.

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Outcome

Sysdoc presented a detailed Training and Documentation (T&D) strategy that provides a statement of intent along with the guidance to deliver learning and documentation services to the approximately 12,000 impacted learners. The strategy has served to analyse, design, develop, implement and measure learning modules that are proving to be meaningful and impactful. The T&D strategy was designed and presented to the project as a ‘living, breathing’ document, meaning that as the project matures and we learn more, the strategy can be reflected upon and continuously improved. To ensure this happens, each project phase is to review, reflect and update the strategy.

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We adapted the traditional Training and Documentation approach to ERP transformation in order to meet the complexity of D@F. This was achieved through:

• A global project onboarding programme.
• A human centred end-user training and documentation collateral, including:
  • High level training needs analysis.
  • eLearning and instructor-led training material.
  • End-user documentation (including SAP Enable Now and ServiceNow).
• Pilot phase documents.
• Training delivery to a schedule that supported the fast movement across multiple businesses in sequence
• A Knowledge Base for learner resources.

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Our training and documentation project was recognised with a Brandon Hall award in 2023 for Best advance in Creating a Learning Strategy.