Reference SAP S/4HANA journey of a regional group.

Disclaimer: this is not a named client, but a reference journey built from situations common in the sub-region. It serves to show how we reason, in what order we work and where we focus our attention. As a matter of principle, it contains no outcome figures.

Journey fact sheet

The starting situation.

Context: A group present in several UEMOA States, with a parent company in Senegal and subsidiaries across the sub-region. Head office runs on SAP ECC, loaded with custom developments accumulated over the years. One subsidiary uses a local ERP, another works on spreadsheets and an accounting package. Each country closes in its own way; consolidation is done by collecting files.
Trigger: The end of mainstream maintenance for SAP ECC at the end of 2027, with extended maintenance possible until the end of 2030, and a management team that wants to use the deadline to harmonise the group's management rather than suffer it.
AGILICIS role: Scoping, then implementation and skills transfer: assessment, comparison of scenarios, choice of operating model, design of the group template, configuration, SYSCOHADA localisation as an extension, data migration, integration, change management.
Scope: Finance and management control, procurement, sales and distribution, inventory; executive reporting; integration with the CRM and local billing systems.
Solutions: SAP S/4HANA private edition (RISE with SAP) · SAP BTP for extensions and localisation · SAP Analytics Cloud for reporting · MuleSoft for integration with Salesforce, where the group has it.
Status: Reference journey, presented as an illustration. Comparable real engagements are presented in a meeting, with the consent of the clients concerned.

The story

From decision to roll-out.

The decision

Management first settles a question that is not an IT question: does the group want a single way of closing, buying and selling, or does each subsidiary keep its habits? The answer sets the level of ambition. It is taken by the executive committee, with the finance department, before any call for tenders.

Scoping

A few weeks to establish an unsparing assessment: inventory of custom developments and their actual use, quality of master data, gaps between the subsidiaries' processes, SYSCOHADA and tax coverage by country, actual connectivity of each site, the teams' capacity to absorb change. Scoping delivers scenarios compared in total cost and in foreign currency, with their conditions for success.

The scenario

For this type of group, the chosen scenario is often a selective transition: head office keeps the history that has value and purges its custom developments; the subsidiaries join a common group template, built to standard, with national localisations as extensions on SAP BTP. Operating model: private edition, to accommodate the existing landscape while imposing explicit architecture governance.

The phases

The initiative moves forward in waves, each delivering intermediate value. First wave: the group template and finance at head office, with the first SYSCOHADA closing produced natively as the success criterion. Following waves: the subsidiaries, one by one or in pairs depending on their tax similarities and connectivity, then procurement and distribution. Skills transfer to the group's teams and to local support runs for the whole duration.

Points of attention

What makes the difference in the sub-region.

SYSCOHADA and national tax regimes

One common accounting framework, eight tax regimes. The group chart of accounts, its national variants, VAT and the returns of each State are designed before configuration. Financial statements come out of the system; localisations live as governed extensions, never in the core.

Data

The same customer, the same supplier, the same item often exist several times, under several spellings, in several subsidiaries. Cleansing and the appointment of a business owner per domain start at scoping. Migrating wrong data means importing the liabilities into the new system.

Connectivity and hosting

Every site is tested for actual latency, at peak hours, before the final choice. Sites that must operate without a connection receive a degraded mode that is designed, not improvised. Data location is examined in light of Law No. 2008-12 and the frameworks of the other countries concerned.

Skills

The initiative is sized to leave, at its end, internal teams capable of keeping the system alive: trained business key users, functional administrators, local support. The names and dates of the skills transfer are in the plan from the outset.

Deliverables

What the group holds in its hands.

The deliverables of a journey of this type, as we produce them. Without quantified indicators: real results are presented in a meeting, with the consent of the clients concerned.

Scoping

Assessment and compared scenarios

Inventory of custom developments and their use, data diagnosis, process map by subsidiary, scenarios in total cost and in foreign currency, argued operating model recommendation.

Design

Group template and custom development doctrine

Company model and group chart of accounts, documented common processes, register of exceptions with the differentiation test, architecture of extensions and integrations.

Implementation

A system that produces its statements

SAP S/4HANA configured to the group standard, SYSCOHADA and tax localisations as extensions, data migrated and cleansed, supervised interfaces, first native closing as the success milestone.

After the project

Autonomous teams and local support

Trained key users, documentation of processes and extensions, architecture governance in place, support and application management provided from Dakar, during your teams' working hours.

From the illustration to your case

And for your group?

Thirty minutes with an AGILICIS expert to compare this reference journey with your existing landscape, your countries and your calendar towards 2027.

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