How Schott is driving digitalisation with ONE Finance

With S/4HANA the complete group picture at the push of a button

Future-proof processes in accounting, controlling and reporting are elementary for global players. The international glass technology specialist Schott AG is switching from the old SAP environment to the new, digital S/4HANA world. Processes are being digitised and system-supported, forward-looking analyses are becoming possible – in all countries and companies worldwide.

From a management perspective, logistical and financial questions always arise: At which location can a product be produced most cheaply? Where do I have the shortest transport routes? Does the initial cost and price calculation fit? These are precisely the questions Schott asked itself. The Mainz-based company with a 135-year history generates global sales of 2.2 billion euros and has 16,200 employees.

 

A global controlling area

Change management is at the heart of these projects. At Schott, there are 80 companies that have to be converted. There are 270 finance employees in the group who need to be picked up as part of the change management. Then there are the stakeholders in the group who use the processes or sub-processes or draw information from the business processes.

Schott’s existing ONE Finance system has uniform standards, processes, data bases and a uniform organisational structure based on the current SAP ECC system. The company-wide control results both on the controlling and on the accounting side. With the help of S/4HANA, this is to be further developed in the coming years. In this way, Schott will achieve comprehensive reporting based on optimised data structures. This means: a global controlling area, a fiscal year variant and a detailed specification of the functional areas.

 

S/4HANA accelerates business processes

“ONE Finance offers us the opportunity to make our system more granular, more concise, more flexible and faster in order to be able to react much better to market situations,” explains CFO Jens Schulte.

As a development plan, S/4HANA establishes a whole series of guard rails that will shape the integrated system of the entire company over a period of 20 or more years. “We expect a whole range of benefits that will take us forward, whether that’s faster or better decisions in our day-to-day business. S/4HANA is a big investment that our group is making as part of the system evolution. It involves a lot of resources. We wanted to get as much out of it as possible for our business,” says Schulte. Therefore, the changeover to S/4HANA as a technological upgrade (brownfield) alone would not be enough for Schott.