Qualiconsult wipes out its IS and migrates to the cloud with SAP

Projects

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The construction audit and verification company Qualiconsult wanted to make a clean sweep of an old, obsolete IS that is poorly suited to innovation. It started from a clean slate for its infrastructure and systems, and migrated its applications to Rise for SAP. CIO met with his Director of Applications at Sapphire, Barcelona.

AdvertisingWhen David Bizien took the position of director of applications at Qualiconsult in 2019, the company had an imposing technical debt which particularly prevented it from innovating. However, at the end of 2018, it had just begun a digital transformation process under the leadership of its management committee. Result? The IT department decided to wipe the slate clean and, among other things, migrate its applications to Rise for SAP.

The Qualiconsult group is an audit and verification group mainly in the world of construction (audit of architect’s plans, verification of compliance with current standards, etc.). It also deals with operational verification, equipment such as escalators, lifting gear, etc. (verification of the carrying out of maintenance, the operation of tools, compliance with procedures, etc. Finally, the group takes care of checks of electricity, asbestos, etc. during entries and exits into the real estate The company has around 2,300 employees and posted €203 million in turnover in 2023. The IT department is divided into two branches: infrastructure, on one side, software on the other: management, production, CRM,. etc.

Massive technical debt

When I arrived in 2019, the company was working on proprietary systems, developed internally, on which it had made few updates, says David Bizien. The existing system was made up of a myriad of small applications, very compartmentalized in different business branches. And within the IT department, the teams worked on different software, with different frameworks. Qualiconsult thus displayed an imposing technical debt, both in terms of infrastructure, systems and software. We had an obsolescence rate of 93%, with for example servers not updated and risks of security breaches. We had to review everything, says the applications director. Server architecture, all network communications, permissions management, security, etc. The SAP project was only one of the building blocks in this complete overhaul process.

We still had files stored in specific drives, a printer and a server in each agency, no consolidation, the networks were very small and it was impossible to exchange large files, etc. And the main contract management application was developed internally on Microsoft’s .Net. And since it was 10 years old, it was patch after patch

force march towards the cloud

The transformation director at the time recruited David Bizien at the beginning of 2019 to take care of the SAP part in particular and more particularly the cloud so as not to reproduce this situation of technical debt. We decided to move towards the cloud forcefully and migrate as many applications as possible, as many servers as possible, he specifies, to benefit from much more regular updates.

AdvertisingHe had to lead several fronts in parallel. I had to set up the BTP (Business Technology Platform) part, identity management for security, recalls the applications director. This project could not be done by Big Bang. The applications were gradually decommissioned to secure all flows. The SAP project itself took place in two main phases. As part of the first, David Bizien first deployed facilitating solutions with SAP Business ByDesign, including SAP Success Factor human resources management or SAP Concur expense report management. These are simpler functions to migrate and deploy, much more than contract management which is central to our activity. Today, when a person arrives at the company, they have their welcome pack in Success Factor and when they leave, all their access is instantly cut off automatically. No more need for a person to cancel their permissions in the 200 or so applications we had!

Relaunch of the project towards Rise for SAP

But on this first phase of the project started in 2019, a lot of things were wrong, whether in our project teams, on the business side, on the integrator side and on SAP. The solution was simply not adapted to our needs. needs. We therefore relaunched the project in 2022. We discussed with SAP and we relaunched a new project this time with Rise for SAP Private Cloud. We made this choice because we have very specific needs, because our job is auditing, explains David Bizien. We need to customize solutions. However, Rise for SAP in the public cloud mainly offers standard business functions. This suits us 90% of the time, but we need to be able to personalize Qualiconsult, for example, manages the sites and equipment on which it operates. Most of the time we need to make a link in SAP between the sales module and the technical equipment management module. But in the Public Cloud version, this is not necessary. We therefore developed it so that it specifically adapts to our activity.

Qualiconsult’s Rise for SAP is hosted by AWS Frankfurt. We had already chosen AWS Frankfurt for the previous project, for which we had part of the construction work in the cloud. At the time, AWS offered the smallest database sizes. Our implementation of S/4Hana is very classic with sales, accounting, management control, etc.

No recovery of histories

As part of its second project, Qualiconsult defined a global framework for the deployment of all functions throughout the group. And in his clean slate approach, the applications director decided not to take up the history of old sales applications, management control, and repositories that existed in this framework. We didn’t even try to analyze the rule patch histories that were not documented, that were in subservices and so on. We have put an end to the past and have returned to a clean solution, to the future. The company used SAP’s Activate method to visualize all of its standard processes and the solutions that existed as standard in the ERP. And it was the job, by exception, to draw our attention to a possible problem, so that we could manage it.

This second project lasted 15 months between September 2022 and January 2024, with a project team of 70 people, internal and external, IT and trades. We are now in production and we have almost everything stabilized. Our biggest module is contract management, and we have transferred more than 200,000 cases and 40,000 customer files. There are still a few applications to switch to Rise for SAP by the end of the year. And certain processes still included a lot of manual manipulation and the company is in the process of automating and industrializing them.

Resumption of flows with SAP Business Technology Platform

We talk a lot about the cloud and the standard when we talk about SAP, but I find that one of their great strengths is flexibility, insists David Bizien. You certainly have a framework that is very strict, very defined for the management of orders, deliveries, invoices, but great flexibility to make changes. Of course, it’s the cloud version that allows it…. The other element that was very important for us was BTP. We managed all our flows from BTP and we generated all the BI, developed applications with our particular needs for planning, production applications, etc. We create links with processes that go to the cloud, we plan, and then it comes back to S/4Hana for invoicing.

A revolution for users

On the data side, Qualiconsult relied on S/4Hana in the cloud with connectors to classic Microsoft SQL databases, for example, to transfer business. This allows users to have BI functions with a current user interface on older applications.

The applications director finally underlines the extent of the change which was of the order of a revolution for users. Nothing was the same anymore, he insists. The screens were different, the data they were working on was different, the concepts were different, etc. And this transformation also required a reorganization of internal IT teams, whose skills no longer necessarily corresponded to the new direction taken by the company. Today, the IT team has around 40 people and uses more service providers.

In the near future, Qualiconsult wants to test SAP Build code to generate applications from AI prompts. The company prefers this type of solution for developers, rather than low code/no code. But this has another interest for us, because we intend to use it to train our own developers in new application writing models. Today, evolution in the cloud is so rapid that we have difficulty training internal teams or finding partners who are sufficiently familiar with the most recent solutions. Build code allows you to generate the applications, but also to open the code to see how it is written to achieve this result. And therefore to train.

Article written by

Emmanuelle DelsolJournalist
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