Case Study | Enercon GmbH
Intercompany billing at Enercon - S4 and Processoptimization
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Unlocking the potential of IC-Billing by taking a step back

The potential of RRICB (Resource Related Intercompany Billing) is to reduce the act of intercompany billing of services to a mere background process not involving manual intervention. This concept , however, can only be achieved if the organization agrees to a centralized execution and reconciliation of the RRICB mechanics. Taking a step back and looking at how you can truly optimize your processes is the start of a good RRICB project.

We realized this approach at the Enercon Group, a technology leader in the production and installation of wind energy Converters with more than 140 legal entities and almost 4000 employees, of which two-thirds are located outside of Germany.

Especially its service & Installation apparatus is organized in regional clusters that work on projects for several companies/countries allowing the maintenance and installation teams to have a better workload balancing and to build on synergies…..the other side of the coin however is that it creates a high volume of intercompany recharge-transactions. This is where RRICB comes in…..

On Enercon’s introduction of a new S4-Hana System, one of the pivoting elements for their systems-architecture was replacing a bespoke tool (called COMZ) used in their ECC system with an SAP standard solution. The old tool supported the process of Intercompany billing of services with its own set of Programs and Tables. The solution had been developed over the years and had its restrictions and issues. To move the application from an ECC to an S4 System proved technically difficult. Replacing the tool was also a chance to resolve historical issues and achieve a higher degree of automation and stability in the IC-Billing process. This is where the business case for RRICB, the SAP standard solution to the problem, was put forward to us.

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„With the GoLive of RRICB, the intercompany billing process between approximately 140 global entities has been successfully launched in a single step. RRICB enables us to perform fully automated intercompany billing as part of the monthly financial closing process, in accordance with SAP standards. The successful implementation of the project was the result of intensive coordination and close collaboration between PIKON, the business team, and our in-house IT department.“

 

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Dennis Freese, Head of Global Finance IT at
ENERCON GmbH

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Proof of concept

PIKON was asked to design an RRICB set up to replace the legacy tool meeting all business and legal requirements. On presenting the draft proposal, a few typical Enercon business requirements became apparent. They were related to the specific tax code derivation based on the country tax rulings of the ship-to party and not the sold-to party. Also, we had to deal with a way of financial reporting that required a rethink of the account determination. Within four weeks, we completed the design and build a small prototype which was presented to the steering committee. This format allowed a proof of concept that convinced all stake holders. After receiving the go ahead from the steering committee, we still had four months left to realize these enhancements in the system. At the same time preparing the organization to adopt the new way of working. Although the legacy tool was already supported by a central department, the challenge was to have all participants accept and use modern technology. The liaison role of the central IT proved to be the lubricant needed to have the user organization accept this highly integrated, cross-module solution. In the end we had to go live with a big bang, meaning more than 1700 partner-relations (contracts) in the group involved in IC-allocation or -recharge had to be processed. Because of the restricted availability of the migration system, we only had the chance to evaluate 10 % of these cases. We mitigated this by performing a pre-run one week before month-end to be able to deal with any issues we might encounter with the settings, the master data, and the new procedures. 

Centralized Execution

Our advantage in this situation was the fact that we had managed to build a central team of 2 business users and 2 IT-Experts ready to engage in the month-end. They were instrumental in running & reconciling the process for all Partners. This tight-knit team that had also received the trust of the management proved hugely important for the Project success at Enercon because they could pick up on technical issues or post differences very quickly and managed to stabilize the new process. One year later, one can say that RRICB at Enercon is mainly a batch process and only on incidents does the central team have to step in again. 

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Tanja Nikolaus
Tanja Nikolaus
Customer Success Manager
+49 (0) 681 379 62 - 169
tanja.nikolaus@pikon.com
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