CENTILLION: Freeing teams to innovate by moving ERP systems to the cloud
Explore CENTILLION’s journey with SAP
CENTILLION hires proactive people who are eager to develop in a high tech environment. By digitalizing manufacturing and business operations using RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, the company has empowered these innovators to focus on what matters for customers and grow the business.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| High tech – manufacturing for healthcare industry | Sofia, Bulgaria | 310 employees | Next Consult Inc. |
reduction in annual financial closing time, to 30 days.
reduction in monthly financial closing time, to 20 days.
reduction in time to produce reports, to five days.
CEO, CENTILLION Ltd.
Unifying ERP to concentrate on growth
Through its electronic devices, systems, bundled products, and services in the fields of medicine, avionics, and precision industrial engineering, CENTILLION Ltd. stands for high-quality, high tech solutions that help improve people’s lives. For 25 years, whether partnering with aerospace companies sending nanosatellites into space or providing repair and maintenance services for cochlear implants, CENTILLION has been defined by three concepts: innovation, quality, and customer support.
Relying on a fragmented mix of local ERP systems that lacked integration with third-party solutions, CENTILLION needed to reinvent its IT landscape to deliver its diverse offerings more efficiently. Its goal was to go paperless in the cloud so that teams could dedicate their time and effort to impactful tasks that help the business grow faster and smarter.
As CEO Nikolay Kirov explains, “CENTILLION is a manufacturing company and, as such, our focus is on manufacturing. It’s important to leave critical activities such as IT infrastructure in the hands of a partner that can maintain them with excellence. We need systems with 99.7% reliability. So, the decision to move to cloud ERP came quite naturally.”
Head of IT Dimitar Lengerov adds, “It was important for us to choose a private cloud system. This would help ensure a much faster initial implementation, less subsequent system maintenance, and very high service reliability.”
Head of IT, CENTILLION Ltd.
Embracing a harmonized, future-proof cloud landscape
After researching the ERP market, CENTILLION decided to implement RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and the SAP Extended Warehouse Management application for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. The company also opted to deploy the SAP Digital Manufacturing solution as well as the SAP Digital Manufacturing bundle for execution to provide shop-floor, quality-control, and other insights.
The powerful combination of these cloud solutions would support extensive digitalization of business and manufacturing processes both now and in the long term.
Kirov says, “Cloud solutions from SAP meet our needs for both data security and data access. And their speed of operation is the same as with an on-premise solution. In addition, without the need to invest in hardware, we knew we’d benefit from stable operating expenses.”
The software would also help CENTILLION improve processes across the company. “SAP solutions allow us to implement best practices right away, greatly reducing the burden of further refinements. And they enable many more options for future integration with cloud solutions,” according to Lengerov.
As the new landscape would radically change the way teams access information and run processes, robust communication with employees was very important both during and after implementation. CENTILLION worked with partner Next Consult Inc. to understand how processes would work, apply best practices, and help teams adjust their ways of working.
Increasing productivity with efficient processes and IT operations
Having implemented RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, CENTILLION benefits from a stable, unified, and high-performing IT landscape that lets teams concentrate on growing the business.
The new landscape can expand smoothly with this growth. As Kirov explains, “After implementing cloud solutions from SAP, we have comprehensive scalability, both horizontally and vertically. We can more easily integrate new SAP software and external systems such as Microsoft Azure.”
Maintaining software is simpler too. Kirov explains, “We receive a bundle of software with no hardware requirements on our side. We benefit from greater data security, more stable connections, and improved upgradeability and product longevity. All that’s required from us is Internet connectivity.”
Lengerov explains how SAP solutions help teams work more productively: “The new system has become the main source of information – and the most accurate one – in the company. This helps us save time, and the time saved can then be invested in value-adding processes for our customers.”
Processes across the company are more efficient. For instance, annual and monthly financial closing periods are significantly shorter, and reporting is also faster.
Dilyana Mihova, head of sales and marketing at the company, says, “After we implemented the new ERP system, improvements were already visible in the first year. They were most noticeable in the finance and sales departments. For example, thanks to easier management of orders and customer information, we’ve started to offer new services. In this way, we’ve gained new customers, improved our operational efficiency, and become more competitive in international markets.”
Building on integrated systems for continuous innovation
Implementing RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition is just the beginning for CENTILLION.
Lengerov says, “After the successful implementation of RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, we’re already working on our next projects involving SAP Extended Warehouse Management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP Digital Manufacturing. These projects will also take advantage of SAP Business Technology Platform.”
As Kirov explains, “This is a foundation that we can intuitively build upon. An example of this is our project involving SAP Digital Manufacturing – a solution that gives us comprehensive traceability and covers diverse requirements of medical device clusters.”
Whatever direction these and future projects take, cloud solutions from SAP will support CENTILLION’s mission to develop future-ready processes that meet customers’ needs into the next quarter century and beyond.
Featured partner
Operating in the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Romania, and Bulgaria, Next Consult Inc. blends strong management consulting expertise with deep IT knowledge to deliver success to clients in over 15 countries. More than 100 of its consultants have completed around 1,500 projects for a wide range of organizations, including some of the world’s market-leading companies.