Background: The SAPmobil Project Summary

The SAPmobil project was launched on October 7th, 2007. In July 2009 the project went live in a "Big Bang" – all modules, business processes, and users started operating together within three days.
 Five weeks after going live Colmobil declared the successful completion of the project and the system went into the operational phase.In the summer of 2007 a two month period of important pre-launch activities occurred, the first of which was to identify the project objectives. CIO Gil Katz guided the project based on these objectives:

• Replace all legacy systems including financial, logistics, vehicle sales, spare parts sales, vehicle warranty, vehicle after sales activities, customer management, and insurance.

• Create a unified, coherent and consistent business language in all lines of business across the group, based on the industry's best practices.

• Create the infrastructure necessary to integrate modern and innovative business technologies.

Next was the decision of how to staff the project. Gil was joined by Itai Rotem, Project Manager and consultant to Colmobil management,  in exploring different staffing models. The final decision (read more in later posts about how the decision was reached) was to self-manage the project without hiring an outside vendor to staff or run it. Colmobil employed the leading individual SAP implementers in Israel for the project, and dedicated their own chosen resources full time.

The project was officially launched on October 7th, 2007. After six months of Business Blueprint, twelve months of Realization and Test, and two months of preparations, the "Big Bang" which included every module/ business process / user -  went live on SAP and most legacy systems were turned off.

All the modules were implemented from the perspective of the business processes. The processes drove the entire design and the implementation activities.

1. FI, CO, TRS (treasury and Risk system) for the Finance department
2. MM and SD for spare parts
3. VMS (Vehicle Management System) for vehicle logistics and sales
4. WTY for vehicle warranty
5. DBM (Dealer Business Management) for workshops and PDI
6. CRM for vehicle sales in showrooms, for workshop customer management, and for customer services and support center
7. SAP-Portal for dealers spare parts ordering, and warranty claims
8. XI for over 160 data interfaces to vehicle manufacturers, dealerships, WMS, banks, insurance companies, government authorities and more.
9. BW for management reporting

Read details of how this very significant success was achieved in later posts.

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