Explore Amadeus’s journey with SAP
Each year, the equivalent of one-quarter of the world’s population uses solutions from Amadeus when traveling. With the RISE with SAP solution, Amadeus has transformed finance processes while embracing cloud ERP, maintaining the stability to enable both travelers and the company to reach their desired destination.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Professional services | Madrid, Spain | >18,000 employees |
days cut from monthly financial closing time.
billing accuracy.
transactions managed each day.
Associate Director for Business Application Platforms, Amadeus IT Group S.A.
Combining a finance transformation with migration to the cloud
If you’ve ever traveled by plane, rail, or boat, chances are you’ve encountered technology from Amadeus IT Group S.A. The company’s solutions and booking systems for airlines, travel agencies, and other industry players help make travel better for two billion passengers across 450 million bookings each year.
With offices in more than 190 countries, Amadeus has a worldwide presence. This allows it to provide localized support and global coverage to diverse customers from hotels to airport operators to cruise lines. However, managing more than 150 million diverse transactions each day using an on-premise ERP system posed challenges for finance and billing operations. The company needed better support for fulfilling data retention requirements and satisfying service-level agreements for invoices.
Amadeus required one data model that would enable standardized global processes and tools, a single version of the truth, and richer and faster insights and analytics. It also wanted to help its finance team become a true partner to the business.
The company sought a finance and billing solution that would aid growth and give internal and external users the tools and knowledge needed to optimize order-to-cash and other business processes. At the same time, it realized that migrating IT systems to the cloud was the right move in terms of reduced latency, scalability, security, and business continuity.
As Stephan Ortner, the company’s associate director for business application platforms, explains: “We had made a strategic decision to move to the cloud. In parallel, we were running a finance transformation project that was entering a critical phase at exactly the same time. We needed to minimize the impact of this cloud migration on the finance program, which was a truly challenging task.”
Associate Director IT Solutions, Amadeus IT Group S.A.
Launching a range of integrated solutions in a stable environment
Amadeus decided the RISE with SAP solution was the right strategic fit for its transition to the cloud. The solution would enable one commercial offer and contract for infrastructure, managed services, and software licenses. And SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition would form the perfect backbone for the company’s transformed finance and billing systems.
Ortner explains, “SAP was a natural choice because we have a long partnership that started in the 1990s and has grown even stronger in recent years. After a lengthy evaluation period, we saw RISE with SAP as absolutely the right option because it offered both scalability and a technical maturity that would be very hard to achieve internally. And we were completely sure that SAP would be the key enabler in our finance transformation.”
Amadeus deployed a range of SAP solutions to underpin its new finance and billing ecosystem. These include the SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solution, which supports smooth order-to-cash processes and timely invoicing.
Meanwhile, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) supports integration, underpinning a range of use cases such as tax reporting in Spain and the UK and electronic invoicing in Italy. SAP BTP also enhances data management, with the SAP Analytics Cloud solution helping Amadeus transform its corporate planning framework, including cash flow forecasting and operational plans.
Jorge Garces, the company’s associate director for IT solutions, says, “The main benefit of the new landscape is simpler integration using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. Without this, it would have been very difficult to build the same sort of functionality from scratch.”
Associate Director IT Solutions, Amadeus IT Group S.A.
Taking finance and billing to the next level
Using RISE with SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, Amadeus transitioned its internal processes to the cloud efficiently and smoothly, boosting operational resilience and modernizing its operations.
Access to the latest updates, enhancements, and industry-specific solutions increases scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. Garces says, “We can now innovate much faster than before. In the past, we managed upgrades and support packages based on our team’s availability. Now, we stick to the strict deadlines provided by SAP.” This improved ability to nimbly react and adjust operational capacity depending on market and demand conditions readies the company for profitable growth in the travel industry.
On the finance side, the company has new finance service centers using standardized SAP solutions, a standardized global template, and unified order-to-cash processes for more than 110 legal entities and over 15,000 people. It has vastly improved billing accuracy, reduced total cost of ownership, sped up financial closing, and enhanced automation, digitalization, and policy harmonization.
Intuitive interfaces and accessible, detailed information have helped streamline global finance processes. And customers and vendors alike are more satisfied thanks to diverse reports that increase visibility and granularity.
The fact that nearly 100% of the IT landscape runs on one solution aids data accuracy. As Garces explains, “Whether reporting externally or internally, we have accurate data that gives us the security that our numbers are right.” He adds that all these improvements enable the finance team to add more value. “The finance organization wanted to be a real partner by supporting the business, specifically those units with different needs for reporting and control. And thanks to our finance transformation enabled by SAP solutions, we’ve been able to achieve this.”
Ortner sums up the experience with RISE with SAP as follows. “Implementing RISE with SAP turned out to be a very good decision. We have a true partnership in which we focus on the application layer and maintain ownership of the technology while SAP does the technical work needed to keep the system stable.”
Exploring the new world of intelligent technology
Amadeus is now ready for the next steps in its cloud journey. Ortner elaborates, “The next big milestones are in our cloud transformation itself. We need to continue the migration for corporate IT and the Amadeus ecosystem. And we’re using SAP BTP and the SAP Cloud ALM solution to take operations to the next level and really benefit from the capabilities we have now.”
One of these new capabilities involves intelligent technology such as AI. Garces says, “We’re already exploring AI use cases such as the possibility of using matching to manage collections in the hospitality industry. It’s likely that AI may change the behavior of travelers, making it harder for our customers to know when people are going to make bookings. Whatever happens, AI is going to be a game changer that raises a lot of questions in this industry. And I truly believe SAP is well positioned to bring us the right answers.”