Acumuladores Moura: Powering innovation and mitigating regulatory risk in the cloud
Supercharging tax reporting using RISE with SAP
For six decades, Acumuladores Moura has been at the forefront of South America’s energy storage industry. To help address new and more complex regulatory requirements around tax accounting in its domestic market in Brazil, the company set out on a digital transformation journey—including a move from on-premises SAP ERP applications to the cloud with RISE with SAP.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial Manufacturing | Belo Jardim, Brazil | 6,500 employees |
Lower total cost of ownership
Faster month-end closing
Reduction in support tickets
Head of IT, Acumuladores Moura
Meeting evolving business requirements
Founded more than 60 years ago in Belo Jardim, Brazil, Acumuladores Moura is a leading manufacturer of battery storage systems. With seven manufacturing units across Brazil and Argentina, the company operates its own network of more than 90 distribution branches. Since it was founded in 1957, Moura has expanded its offering to include batteries and energy storage systems for a diverse range of applications, including motorcycles, boats, forklifts, uninterruptible power supplies, subways, trains, phone booths, and more.
In the past, Moura relied on SAP ERP applications to drive its end-to-end operations. Francisco Dias, Head of IT at Acumuladores Moura, elaborates: “For years, we’ve used SAP solutions to support our key business processes, from sales and distribution and warehouse management to accounting and reporting.”
While the SAP applications had served the company well for many years, its aging on-premises implementation was beginning to cause operational challenges. The company’s core ERP application was several versions behind the latest update cycle, which increased the cost and complexity of routine maintenance and presented barriers to future upgrade work.
Dias continues: “It was becoming harder and harder to ensure a high level of performance, availability, and security for our key business systems. For example, we were struggling to adapt the system to recent changes in the tax accounting requirements in Brazil. This delayed our closing processes and led our accounting teams to engage costly external consulting resources to help complete the work.”
Head of IT, Acumuladores Moura
Embarking on a digital transformation initiative
As part of a wider digital transformation effort, Moura decided to move from its on-premises SAP ERP implementation to the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution. By switching to the cloud, the company aimed to eliminate the challenges of day-to-day system management and maintenance while gaining access to the latest accounting and reporting capabilities of SAP S/4HANA.
“The value proposition of RISE with SAP perfectly addresses the goals of our digital transformation strategy,” says Dias. “By moving to the cloud, we get access to robust information security controls from SAP, as well as best practices around data governance, risk management, and more.”
For Moura, another perceived advantage of cloud was the opportunity to free its IT teams from firefighting technical issues. Dias adds: “We want to assign our IT resources where they can add the greatest value to the business. By making it faster and easier to carry out upgrades and updates, we were confident that we could empower our IT teams to spend less time on systems management and more time on innovation.”
Head of IT, Acumuladores Moura
Achieving a smooth transition to cloud
Working side-by-side with its SAP partner, Moura divided the implementation work into two stages. First, the company modernized its existing ERP environment by upgrading to the latest version of SAP S/4HANA. Next, the company migrated its ERP data to the cloud with RISE with SAP.
“From end to end, the deployment and migration process for SAP S/4HANA took around eight months to complete, which was a relatively short timeline for such a complex project,” recalls Dias. “During the process, we took the opportunity to analyze and refresh our integrations with non-SAP solutions and bring our SAP Ariba solution up to date. Overall, the project went smoothly, and we were very pleased with the support we received from SAP and our implementation partner.”
Head of IT, Acumuladores Moura
Building a platform for innovation
By moving to the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution, Moura has gained a solid foundation to support the evolving needs of its international business. As well as improving application performance for end users, the company can support the latest tax accounting requirements—enabling it to accelerate and streamline month-end closing activities.
“Before, month-end closing could take more than two weeks and often involved costly external consulting resources,” explains Dias. “Today, we’ve slashed the closing process to just five working days—67% faster. Thanks to RISE with SAP, we have considerably reduced our exposure to regulatory risk.”
Transitioning from an on-premises environment to the cloud is also enabling Moura to deliver higher availability and improved security for its users—all at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Dias confirms: “Since we moved to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, we’ve seen more than a 60% reduction in support tickets from the business, which is a testament to the reliability of the solution. RISE with SAP enables us to deliver always-on services to our business users while cutting TCO by more than 20%.”
He concludes: “With SAP S/4HANA, we get the peace of mind that SAP is providing high levels of performance, availability, and security—helping my team focus on delivering value to the business.”