AGILITA: Transforming core business processes in the cloud

When the first cloud solutions came onto the market, Sandra Völler knew the cloud was the future. As managing director at SAP partner AGILITA AG, she immediately began enabling customers to implement this new cloud technology – but others were skeptical. Völler needed to convince the business that cloud transformation was the right move for AGILITA.

In time, AGILITA’s edge on cloud understanding made the company one of the most successful system houses in Switzerland, and the number of employees rose from 60 to 100 in two years. But this increase in personnel took AGILITA’s IT environment to its limits, which meant its small-scale and agile cloud projects required completely new processes. To master this challenge, Völler opted for the same solution that her team successfully implements for customers.

AGILITA decided to implement SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Why? “A third of our employees are currently involved in SAP S/4HANA implementations,” Völler says. “It was important to me that they all had a user perspective of the suite. Above all, it opens up tremendous benefits for us.”

As professionals in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, AGILITA faced an unusual challenge: too much know-how. “We naturally have first-class programmers for SAP S/4HANA Cloud,” Claudia Nietlisbach, head of the project and senior consultant at AGILITA, says. “So, it was tempting to adapt the standard solution to our old processes. But we resisted that. After all, we wanted to transform our business processes alongside our IT.”

The project team, led by Nietlisbach, opted for a strategy consisting of small steps. Starting in January 2020, single functions were introduced in parallel to day-to-day business – all in standard form for SAP solutions – and completed by April.

However, the experts did not completely forgo the skills of their programmers. In just a few days, they developed an application based on SAP Business Technology Platform that greatly simplifies data access and interaction. Employees can use it to view their vacation times, access customer data in the CRM system, record their expenses, and manage other tasks with an elegant launchpad and access on tablets and smartphones.

Völler summarizes the advantages of the new system in three areas: transparency, scalability, and more precise project control. Transparency is provided by always-available insights into real-time data, such as milestones, times, expenses, and vacations, using analysis dashboards that can be flexibly adapted to meet the needs of the respective user.

“It used to take a colleague half a day each week to do these analyses,” Völler says. “Today, analytics is simply built in.” For example, services can now be tracked and billed daily, and, as the processes rise in quality, so too does the quality of the billing. With the old system, transparency would have demanded a great deal of additional effort.

The second point, scalability, is particularly important for AGILITA’s fast-growing business. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, new employees can be quickly onboarded and informed about any current project’s status. Information doesn’t get lost in the noise and, with the significantly simplified and granular project control, the overall package does exactly what is required of it.

AGILITA’s transformation meant more than new technical features – it triggered a fundamental change company-wide.

“The project gave us the chance to get to know our company better and to question our processes,” Nietlisbach says. “Which figures do management really need to see? How can responsibilities be even better distributed? This led to many eureka moments!”

Thanks to the new system, project managers now have clear sovereignty over the projects and bear more responsibility. They can now access billing proposals directly and approve them, whereas they could previously only do this for hours worked. Users can access the right information without having to consult the finance department, for example.

Project reports are now far more detailed, providing significant customer satisfaction. AGILITA can clarify the meaning behind individual items in billing, such as the exact steps taken in a “customising” process. Quality assurance benefits from this and customers can clearly identify the good work AGILITA is doing.

In the future, AGILITA has further grand plans for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. “Our appetite has only grown,” says Sven Staub, head of Customer Experience, AGILITA AG. “Since the app has been up and running, our colleagues have been asking for new functions. The team will soon enable automated processing of incoming invoices based on existing contract frameworks. With this plan and yet more in the pipeline, it seems that the transformation at AGILITA has only just begun.