A Case Study Of Cost Management In SAP S/4 HANA Project

Start from the 21 st century,our society has stepped into digital economical time,the booming high technologies,such as Big Data,Internet of Things,Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain has brought about repid development and progress of the times,and presented so many opportunities to enterprise operation,as well as unique challenges.Faced with the unprecedented rapid development of science and technology,network and economy,enterprises increasingly rely on intelligent software system.Most enterprises are on their way to digital transformation.In response to this situation,SAP launched the Next Generation Business Suite and Industry Solution-SAP S/4 HANA system,which is built based on SAP HANA database.SAP S/4 HANA system could facilitate the transformation of intelligent enterprises by integrating various internal resources,supporting comprehensive management needs of enterprises.However,the comprehensive and powerful functionalities of S/4 HANA system have also correspondingly brought about nerve-wracking problems,such as long project implementation cycle,hard implementation and high implementation cost.Once the implementation of the project fails,the enterprise may fall into an irreparable dilemma.This makes many enterprise customers hesitate and even shrink back.Based on a real instance of SAP S/4 HANA implementation project happened in company I,this thesis uses documentary analysis,case analysis and earned value analysis to analyze the cost management problems in detail.Firstly,according to the modern project cost management theory,the project cost management is "activity determines cost,rather than cost determines activity".In the project estimation stage,however,this case project only considers the company's business volume and similar ERP project implementation experience in the past,without detailed analysis of the particularity of this project.Namely,comparing the traditional ERP system,SAP has made so many changes and adjustments for SAP S / 4 HANA system,however,the project team did not carefully consider the impact of these changes on the implementation of the project,let alone make a detailed project activity planning for this part,then finished the cost estimate work.Aiming at this problem,this thesis puts forward some suggestions as per the activity-based project cost management theory.That is to say,project team need to discuss,analyze and plan project activity scale and method in order to cope with those changes happened on S/4 HANA system at the early stage.After that,project team also needs to estimate the required input in detail for every activity of manpower and material resources,time,cost,and make statistics and optimization,so that we could raise a much more detailed plan in Project cost budgeting stage.Secondly,it also frequently happened that the sharing of information among different project teams is often not that so timely,so that the project cost is increased because of idle work,rework and the delay of project progress.In order to avoid the emergence of above cost management issues,this article also puts forward the necessity to make improvements from project activity scale and method these two aspects at the beginning stage of the project,as per the activity-based project cost management theory.Finally,in view of the project schedule delay and cost waste phenomenon that caused by some stakeholders behavior,this thesis considers the Total factor cost management theory,which is part of Overall project cost management theory,and then suggests setting up a joint working group on the premise of the common project goal,to strengthen the project management objective,and finalize the way to save project cost and achieve cost management goal together by holding cost management meetings on a regular basis.