Mitsubishi Power Americas is a dynamic and growing business that needs to move to SAP S/4HANA to ensure ongoing enterprise support. The company worked with Capgemini to create a brownfield strategy for the upgrade on an accelerated timeline. The move will help Mitsubishi Power move faster, make more data-driven decisions, and provide better user and customer experience.

Powering the future

Mitsubishi Power creates a future that works for people and the planet through innovative generation technology and solutions. With more than 3,500 employees focused on empowering customers in power generation and delivering innovative solutions, the company’s power generation solutions include gas, steam, and aero-derivative turbines, power trains and power islands, geothermal systems, environmental controls, and services.

With the increasing power demands of artificial intelligence and data centers, it is focused on ways to meet demand responsibly, affordably, and sustainably for its customers.

Its SAP ECC version needed to be upgraded before the pending end-of-maintenance support deadline in December 2027. This requires migration on a massive scale on a tight deadline, because the company not only manufactures products but also provides support services and equipment maintenance.

Large-scale migration

The tight timeline presented significant challenges.

“We had to figure out how to manage a project that considered multiple SAP ECC systems and others using different software applications altogether,” said Tom McGlinchey, Director, SAP ERP Solutions, Mitsubishi Power Americas. “This amounts to a total of 12 modules across multiple companies in multiple countries and multiple languages. To add to the complexity, our existing ECC application was highly customized due to different business processes and statutory requirements.

“Our business runs 24/7 because we keep the lights on. We have critical support windows that align to planned maintenance outage times for our customers, so minimizing downtime during the upgrade cutover period was my top priority.”

Choosing a brownfield approach

McGlinchey has experience deploying SAP in more than 42 countries, so he understands how important it is to keep to scope and plan. Adding enhancements can lengthen the timeline and increase risk. Mitsubishi Power had to weigh the functionality improvements in these options against the benefit of reduced risk.

The team considered a greenfield approach but opted for the brownfield option because it allowed the company to adopt important customizations, reduce the timeframe, and keep existing business processes in place.

Having 12 modules included in the project scope was a huge challenge and had a major impact on the plan. Because service is a big part of the company’s business, using the existing customer service module with its customizations was critical. Since tools like SAP Signavio do not treat customer service as standard, pulling data and processes is not always possible. This was also true for Quality Management.

Leveraging prework

“We knew that, to be successful, we needed the full support from our executive team and strong business buy-in,” he said. “Our team had the technical knowhow but the business had the expertise to ensure the processes would actually run on SAP S/4HANA, and they had the resources to support the project.”

The 12 ECC modules generated significant amounts of data, so ensuring the archives were up-to-date was essential. Working with Capgemini on a brownfield approach helped the client identify prework activities that could reduce both timeline and risk.

“Data archiving means alignment on rules and retention periods,” he said. “We also needed a solution that would work with both SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA.”

Mastering data

The company reviewed archiving and upgrade acceleration options with Capgemini. The recommendation was to move to SAP’s Business Partner (BP) Consolidation requirement, even while the company was still on the ECC environment. This combines, cleanses, and manages BP master data within an SAP system, and is usually used to identify duplicate records across multiple systems and merge them into a single “golden” record.

“I really want to highlight how critical this was,” McGlinchey said. “Being able to set up Business Partner records before the upgrade began was a huge time saver. Not only did it help with the upgrade itself but it also got the business engaged and moving on customer, vendor, and employee master data clean-up. This was really a key to our success and why the project is still in the green.”

Master data is critical, so eliminating duplicates and archiving and removing unused or invalid records needs to happen in the prework. McGlinchey recommends considering archiving only change logs, attachment records, and records marked for deletion because it improves current performance and reduces the cutover effort for the go-live weekend.

Capgemini also recommended a Change Management Assessment to see how prepared the business was for an upgrade.

Powering success

The executive team led and championed this major business and technical effort. It reviewed open projects, set priorities, and allowed a freeze on non-business critical changes, which supported the success of the project. Executives also participated in a regular steering committee where issues, concerns, and risks were discussed, actioned, and mitigated quickly.

This empowered steering committee, which included people from both IT and business, was brought into the conversation early, to act on issues and escalations quickly.

“Our business is too critical to run unsupported software, so I have been actively working within our organization to stress the importance of starting the upgrade as early as possible,” he said. “Even though the move to SAP S/4HANA is considered to be mainly a technology upgrade, full executive sponsorship and buy-in are the keys to success.”

Empowering the future

The next step will be to integrate one of the company’s other affiliates from its SAP ECC environment into the SAP S/4HANA environment. It is also looking to implement Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) and Integrated Business Planning (IBP).

“Capgemini stayed focused on having the right people in the right roles and, when adjustments were needed, they addressed them quickly in partnership with us,” McGlinchey said. “On a project this size, the level of responsiveness is a big deal and reflects a true partnership.”