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In today’s booming mobile environment, Vodafone

Group — a business that has mobility hardwired into

its DNA — considers itself fortunate to be in the right

industry at the right time, with the right products and

strategy. The business has seen incredible growth since its

avant-garde beginnings 27 years ago. By revenue, it is the larg-

est mobile service provider in the world, and it services almost

400 million customers across Europe, the US, Africa, and Asia.

London-based Vodafone grew quickly in its various mar-

kets by successfully establishing local operating companies

that catered products and services to the local market’s needs.

However, the business lacked common practices, centralized

operations, and data sharing between operating companies.

For Vodafone to continue to grow at such a robust pace, the

company needed to function more like a single entity and less

like a network of individual businesses.

And a major business transformation has done that. In

the next phase of transformation, the company plans to use

mobility to continue its growth strategy.

“Given our business, we’d like to see about 80% of our

internal transactions happening on a mobile device,” says

Niall O’Sullivan, Global Finance Transformation Director

at Vodafone. “We are obsessed with operating with speed,

simplicity, and trust. With this transformation completed, I

believe that mobility can help really drive speed and simplicity

in everything we do.”

Vodafone employees have been using mobile apps on their

BlackBerry devices and a mobile intranet for years. “We always

focused on mobile, but now we are working on bringing mo-

bility to enterprise applications,” says O’Sullivan. “For example,

we want our employees to be able to approve leave requests

or expense reports while traveling — in a secure, quick, and

easy-to-use mobile app — instead of clicking on the internet

and using office time for those tasks.”

Transformation Strengthens the CoreIn 2006, a group of Vodafone executives went to the

company’s board with a plan for a business transformation

Vodafone Walks the Talk

Going Mobile with One of the World’s Biggest SAP ERP Implementationsby David Hannon, Senior Features Editor

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This article appeared in the OCT NOV DEC 2012 issue of insiderPROFILES (http://insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com) and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.

processes locally with the help of a

systems integrator and local resources.

The technology platform that would

underpin this transformation would

be an SAP ERP system — designed to

facilitate the sharing of information

and drive common processes. This will

now be combined with the power of

Sybase Unwired Platform. O’Sullivan

hopes this mixture of technology will

make access to Vodafone’s core enter-

prise systems for the 63,000 SAP users

as easy as shopping online at Amazon

and eBay or using a mobile app on an

iPhone or Android device.

“Being on one global platform

for finance, HR, and the supply

chain would speed up our business

processes and make life simpler and

better for our employees — even those

who don’t access the SAP system on a

daily basis and might only use it every

few weeks to enter a leave request,”

says O’Sullivan. “The key is to engage

more of these occasional SAP users and

get them interacting with the system

on their mobile device.”

Starting with ProcurementHow does a business begin its journey

undertaking one of the biggest SAP

ERP implementations in the world?

With a year of process design and fine-

tuning completed, Vodafone targeted

procurement as the first business pro-

cess for transformation using the new

SAP ERP system. Like many decentral-

ized companies spread across a wide

geography, Vodafone wanted to better

leverage its massive spend with its ma-

terial and service suppliers. By tackling

procurement early on, the transforma-

tion project could gain ROI quickly and

win further support internally.

But rather than establish a cen-

tralized procurement department,

Vodafone created a procurement com-

pany that is based in Luxembourg and

operates on the centralized SAP plat-

form. As O’Sullivan explains, today,

the Vodafone Procurement Company

signs the contracts with suppliers and

buys goods or services on behalf of the

individual Vodafone businesses. The

unique structure ensures the majority

of the company’s spend goes through

the central organization. Suppliers can

better see and plan their volumes with

Vodafone because they’re selling to

one company instead of to many.

Globetrotting: Technology RolloutsWith the new procurement company

up and running on the SAP system,

Vodafone took on its next major trans-

formation step: create a centralized

shared services organization and bring

it onto the SAP ERP system. Vodafone

selected Budapest, Hungary as the loca-

tion and built an entire shared services

organization from scratch — including

purchasing a new office building and

hiring staff — while simultaneously

implementing SAP ERP.

“This was the first time we brought in

shared services, so getting Hungary up

and running was a huge deal for us, es-

pecially because we were still designing

the SAP ERP system while implement-

ing it,” O’Sullivan says. The company

has since established two more shared

services organizations in India and all

are running smoothly on SAP ERP.

After the pilot implementation in

Hungary, Vodafone chose to introduce

the operating company in Germany to

the new processes and brought it onto

the SAP platform. As Vodafone’s largest

market, the project team felt this com-

pany would present the biggest trans-

formation challenge. “Germany could

not go wrong,” says O’Sullivan. “We had

to make sure the system worked prop-

erly, so we did a tremendous amount

of testing and made all the necessary

modifications before we went live.”

From there, the project team brought

a long list of operating companies on-

line, prioritizing the implementations

based on each operating company’s

size, complexity, and appetite for

change. “The early rollouts are difficult

and you need all the support you can

From the start of the initiative, Vodafone management wanted to instill the idea that the project was a business transforma-tion underpinned by an ERP implementa-tion and not an ERP implementation that would change local business processes. To help drive that message home, the board chose O’Sullivan, a former CFO of an operating company, to lead the project because he came not from IT, but from the business side. “We wanted to be sure everyone under-stood from the beginning this was a busi-ness transformation,” he says. “And we learned you need to remind people of that at every stage of the project.” A full year before the ERP implementa-tion began, all of the operating compa-nies’ department heads of finance, supply chain, and human resources attended a series of workshops in London to map out common, global processes in those key areas. O’Sullivan says the goals of those workshops were to agree on core concepts and gain buy-in from the businesses for proposed changes. Once the processes were firmly estab-lished, Vodafone took another step to en-sure that they would be implemented as designed, and that the business leaders maintained control over the processes after the ERP implementation began. That step included creating the Vodafone Global Design Authority, a committee made up of key senior business leaders across the organization responsible for owning the processes. Any time a person or group sug-gested a change to one of the processes (which included the IT organization during the ERP implementation), the Global De-sign Authority had to approve the change.

Setting the Stage: A Business-Led Project

aimed at creating a centralized shared services

organization and a set of common processes

in finance, human resources, and the supply

chain for all of its operating companies. The

implementation plan called for a core proj-

ect team to visit each of the individual oper-

ating companies and implement these new

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get,” O’Sullivan says. “Early successes

are vital to keep the momentum and

support of the executive team.”

Each operating company brought its

own unique challenges and demands,

and no two rollouts were exactly the

same. Many of the companies had

grown very quickly, and chose numer-

ous different legacy systems based on

local requirements or competitive

reasons. Challenges usually involved

striking a balance between time, qual-

ity, and cost — move too quickly and

quality will suffer, which increases

costs in the long run; focus too much

on quality, though, and the project

will slow to a crawl while costs spiral.

Making People a PriorityIn addition to which legacy systems

were currently in place, O’Sullivan

says there were two major personnel

factors that determined how success-

ful a rollout would be: the skills of

the local project team and the will-

ingness of the local organization to

accept change.

Vodafone’s primary systems inte-

gration partner, Accenture, filled in

skills gaps when needed and assisted

with change management in the

local markets. Gradually, the project

team — including Vodafone internal

staffers and the Accenture experts —

learned to assess early on how to best

allocate resources in a specific project.

For example, if members of an oper-

ating company weren’t present for

the project kickoff meeting, or they

were there but disinterested, the proj-

ect team knew that company would

require more attention.

“If they didn’t show up to the kick-

off meeting, it was a pretty clear sign

Objective: Standardize business processes, leverage best practices across a diversified business portfolio, and eventually deliver 80% of transactions through mobile devices

Solution: Created a global shared services organization, all underpinned by a single instance of SAP ERP, and rolled out mobile apps internally, supported by Sybase Unwired Platform

Benefits: Better visibility and collaboration across business units, more users accessing the enterprise system, improved spend leverage and procurement savings, and faster financial reporting

At a Glance

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there would be some pushback,”

O’Sullivan says. “Or if their comments

at the meeting were negative or

they had very few questions, it dem-

onstrated they were not that engaged

in the project.”

At the same time, the project team

had to be sensitive to local trends

occurring during the rollouts. For

example, if an operating company

resided in a country experiencing a

downturned economy, the personnel

there may have mixed feelings toward

the rollout. Introducing a dramatic

business and technology change could

be embraced by some as a way to

improve their situation, but eyed by

others as an additional distraction

during a very stressful time.

“We learned the success of these

projects depended on the people

involved even more than we realized,”

O’Sullivan says. “That includes the

strength of the core team, the exper-

tise from the systems integrator, and

a strong local team at the operating

companies. It’s imperative that the

various teams have the right skills

and work seamlessly together in the

local projects.”

The Latest Benefits and Initial Mobile AppsVodafone is now finishing the rollout

with its remaining operating compa-

nies and beginning to loop back to the

earliest implementations to deploy

IT functionality updates and make

improvements based on what it has

learned in the process. For example,

O’Sullivan says the team learned a lot

about usability based on employee

testing and feedback over the course

of the project, and is enhancing the

interfaces for the early rollouts to be

more user-friendly.

The business has also started to

roll out some initial enterprise apps

for mobile devices. The first mobile

app was a travel and expense report-

ing app. “Employees can take a photo

of their receipts and get paid without

using any paper, and they can request

or approve leave requests on their

phones all at one time,” O’Sullivan says.

So far, Vodafone has signed up for

four applications, with more to come.

“We think these mobile apps will be

a major advantage in driving compli-

ance, reducing the level of frustration

in the usage, and reducing the level

of resistance to the actual processes

themselves,” he says. “We want to im-

plement as many apps as quickly as we

can and get as many users as possible

to have the vast majority of their inter-

action with the system on their phone.”

But the potential goes much deeper

than that, according to O’Sullivan. “Be-

cause mobility provides easy access for

employees who don’t typically engage

with the SAP systems, more employees

are using the system,” he says. “And the

more users we have on the system, the

greater the return on investment.”

Vodafone’s business transformation

project is producing real results both

in terms of cost savings and business

efficiency. At a strategic level, the ben-

efits of getting the various operating

companies to think more uniformly

has produced less tangible, but equally

important benefits. “This was the first

time we introduced the shared ser-

vices concept in this company, and the

change in thinking that idea brings is

significant,” says O’Sullivan. From an IT

perspective, the support and adminis-

tration of one single centralized system

is much more efficient than supporting

many local systems.

When O’Sullivan looks back on

the scope of Vodafone’s transforma-

tion, he’s proud of what the team has

accomplished. “We affected tremen-

dous change across the organization.

We established and implemented com-

mon supply chain, HR, and finance

processes that now work in every

market across the business. And the

underlying technology that pins it all

together is the common ERP system.”

Vodafone can now show its custom-

ers how the business itself is working

internally with speed, simplicity, and

trust.

Headquarters: London, England

Industry: Mobile phone service provider

Employees: 86,400

Revenue: $72.6 billion (£46.6 billion) (NASDAq: VOD)

Company details:• More than 404 million customers in 30

countries across five continents • Services include voice, messaging, data,

and fixed broadband• Made the first ever mobile call on

January 1, 1985 • Owns 45% share in Verizon Wireless in

the US• Embarked on a finance, supply chain,

and HR transformation in 2006• Current business strategy focuses

on four key areas: data services, emerging markets, enterprise and total communications, and new services

SAP solutions:• SAP ERP • SAP ERP HCM • SAP SCM

“We are obsessed with operating with speed, simplicity, and trust. With this transformation completed, I believe that mobility can help really drive speed and simplicity in everything we do.”— Niall O’Sullivan, Global Finance

Transformation Director, Vodafone

Company SnapshotVodafone Group

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