A few years ago, the Massachusetts-based solar energy company Evergreen Solar reached a turning point. The company was building its first plant overseas in Germany and was about to make the leap from being a small research and development company to becoming a full commercial operation. To accommodate future growth, the company decided to upgrade its IT systems. Evergreen was fast outgrowing its entry level, largely homegrown legacy systems. The company wanted to eliminate manual procedures, gain insight into all of its business processes as well as meet its Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) reporting requirements.

Evergreen began to search for an out-of-the-box solution that would combine top tier technology with best practices. Having evaluated many providers and products, Evergreen chose SAP. The SAP Business Suite, featuring embedded, easily adoptable best practices perfectly met Evergreen’s requirements. Most ERP systems require the costly services of an army of consultants and take many months to implement. Contrastingly, Evergreen worked with SAP and business partner Yash (then Genesis Corporate Solutions) to implement the new system in just 12 weeks with no data transfer issues.

The result: Evergreen has witnessed substantial improvements to many of its business processes from accounting and forecasting to plant maintenance and inventory management. The company’s production forecasting and product costing systems have become more visible and straightforward. The new system enables more streamlined and transparent realtime sales forecasting aligned with inventory and production planning. The company also has a clearer understanding of its equipment maintenance and downtime costs and was able to meet the SOX reporting requirements in time for the tight compliance deadlines.

When Evergreen began implementing SAP, the company had about 275 employees. When its new U.S. plant that is currently being ramped is fully open by mid-2009, it will have a workforce of over 1,000. As Evergreen continues to grow, it is developing its SAP roadmap for the future. For example, one of the company’s upcoming priorities is to leverage SAP solutions to improve supplier relationship management processes.

“We were able to prove that you don’t have to be a very large company to implement SAP,” says Mark Fidler, Senior Director of Finance and IT, Evergreen Solar. “The more we understand our business requirements, the more we look to SAP to provide us with the foundation for running our business processes.”