The Power of Epiphany: How Purdue Went Paperless

A data pro's work is never done! That lesson rang loud and clear through the halls of Purdue University recently, as the venerable institution threw down the gauntlet to wide-scale digital transformation. Targeting 700 business processes and more than a dozen enterprise systems, a broad-based team rolled up their collective sleeves, and dove headlong into a two-year, $24-million dollar endeavor.

The end game? A full conversion to SAP's S/4HANA, encompassing a vast array of mission-critical systems. The process was long, the stakeholders many, but with a solid plan and serious determination, the team pulled off three major go-live events in succession. And already, the benefits are demonstrating return on that investment, which has many a senior administrator smiling. 

The Vision

An engagement of this magnitude requires detailed orchestration of highly diverse resources. With interdependencies aplenty, the program would span numerous departments, touching the day-to-day lives of several thousand employees. Teachers, students, administrators, janitors, counselors and contractors alike would see and feel a difference in their workflow.

Owing to the significance of the project scope, team lead Stacy Umlauf made clear to the business stakeholders that the path forward would involve uncertainty: "Things are going to change, but we don't know exactly how."

That remarkable statement points to a positive business culture. Many organizations would defer action when faced with such an unpredictable scenario, especially with such a significant investment of time and money on the line. But the top brass obviously recognized the need for transformation, and gave the green light. 

Careful is as careful does, and there were many early signs that built confidence in the overall program. Umlauf and team involved a wide range of business stakeholders, and scheduled regular meetings to hash out issues and stay on top of the fast-moving train. They held weekly design sessions for planning and issue resolution, including their CFO and Comptroller, as well as Directors of Business Management & Financial Planning and Analysis.

They also embraced the full complement of tools and techniques in order to herd the appropriate cats. Early in the game, they developed visual organization charts such that business owners could better understand the new structures. A big part of the new worldview would involve a clearer view of cost centers versus profit centers. 

As a practical matter, they developed an account conversion database in order to create mock-ups that would show how the new structure would report prior year data. For anyone who's ever spent time in the trenches of financial close, this trick proves very useful in the hardscrabble world of managing exceptions: those unwieldy transactions that defy automation.

Mastering Data

Which brings us to the a-ha moment! Umlauf explained at length the amount of time and effort that was required to prepare the data for go-live. During that cleansing process, she came to a realization. Regarding the tremendous amount of work that was required, she said, flatly: "When you think you're done, you're not!" At a certain point, she realized they had to pull the trigger.

"We did just 2,000 converted objects," she said. "Still wish we could have gotten that number down lower. We had to work closely with the S/4HANA customer care team on fixes, industry solutions, and escalation. OSS Notes are critical. We have done 150+ OSS notes with a focus on 3 key areas: freezes on master data; purchase orders; get as stable as possible."

And that part about the master data? Yes, the master data! For an environment as complex as Purdue's, with so many different systems in the mix, focusing on master data management paid tremendous dividends. The simple reason is that effective master data management helps to virtually reconcile disparate information systems. 

"We did a lot of downloads before we migrated 10 years of data to S/4HANA," said Umlauf. Yes, 10 years of production data! "We did a final tie-out and reconciliation before we did any transformations at all." This was another critical success factor. They knew that transformation should be the final step in the process. Doing so sooner would have complicated the work. 

"We gradually added additional users," said Umlauf, "and that helped build confidence in what we were building. Yes, my account numbers are changing, but my job is not entirely different," she noted, referencing the reality on the ground for many of their users. 

In all, Purdue tackled Enterprise Asset Management, Financial Services, Procurement, Grants Management and more. They vastly simplified their organizational master data, decreasing the number of accounts from nearly 100,000 down to just over 40,000 by go-live; GL entities from 2,500 to less than 1,500, and... (wait for it): cost center from ~8,700 to just over 1,000!

"We run 10,000 POs per month via Ariba," said Umlauf. In the data clean-up process, they were able to clean up "thousands" of old POs, dating way back to 2013! It's safe to assume those purchase orders got processed one way or another around the time they were generated; but accounting for all that in the appropriate systems just never got done, or formally recognized.

That's the power of paperless! In fact, the team did the math, and realized that the amount of paper they saved by going thoroughly digital, if stacked up carefully, document over document, each one laid flat on top of the next, would surpass the height of the Purdue University Bell Tower, and by a good margin!

And a final lesson? Noted Umlauf: Practice, practice, practice! "We performed 7 conversions between SBX, DEV, QAS x2 + 2 Cutover rehearsals which provided the team confidence going into go-live." She also pointed out the critical importance of a strong team: "different backgrounds, different view points, and different personalities make the best product."

The Products

When all was said and done, Umlauf and her team deployed the following litany of SAP products:

SAP PS - Project Systems - Key for complex project management, this module allows the integrated design, orchestration and management of projects

SAP GL - General Ledger - the financial foundation of any organization, moving this from one system to another requires fastidious attention to detail. 

SAP AR - Accounts Receivable - show me the money! Universities need to make money, just like any business; and cash flow is as critical in today's market as ever.

SAP AP - Accounts Payable - show *you* the money! Never underestimate the importance of paying vendors in a timely fashion; this is extremely important for reputation management, and for retaining the highest quality service providers. In fact, Umlauf's team placed heavy focus on coordinating with third party systems early and throughout the program.

SAP FM - Funds Management - A critical module for any institute of higher learning, this helps to budget all expenses and revenues for distinct areas of responsibility, help control future funds transactions in alignment with a distributed budget, and to prevent the budget being exceeded.

SAP CO - Controlling - like procedural glue, this module allows the monitoring and optimization of business processes; helps with the management of profit and cost centers; leverages MDM to enable strategic management, recording both the consumption of production factors and the services provided by an organization.

SAP TR - Transport Requests - Down in the weeds! An SAP Transport is a package used to transfer data from one SAP installation to another. It can be considered an update. This is where rubber literally meets road in an SAP transformation.

Let's call it a protracted teachable moment -- this remarkable two-year time span -- for one of the great American universities. "We have our annual coming up soon," concluded Umlauf, "so we'll see how it goes." Humility goes a long way in the world of digital transformation. Indeed, a data professional's work is never done!