ERP - ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING

Value creation through customized processes

We harmonise your processes and make them future-proof

The processes mapped in their ERP system are the prerequisite for good interaction between all areas. They are the company’s digital backbone. As process-oriented consultants, we support you in optimising and standardising your business processes and relaunching and further developing your systems. We do this based on the PIKON 3-Point-Approach, which combines the needs of people, IT and business management into a meaningful whole.

This results in powerful processes, optimally adapted to your needs for greater competitiveness and productivity. But it’s also about turning technological innovations into new, future-proof processes that your employees live and breathe.

PIKON – your partner for sustainably efficient SAP consulting and application support.

Overview of our ERP consulting services

Finance

Controlling

Sales

Production

Purchasing

Service

Project System

ERP-Support

Your process experts

Processes are the backbone of the company and create the basis for your company’s digitisation and competitiveness. As process-oriented consultants we support you in this process.

ERP-Consulting Services

Finance

With its various links to other ERP modules, accounting is a key component in every company’s business processes. SAP offers a solution that is well established on the market with Finance in SAP ECC and S/4HANA. The PIKON team supports you with many best practice approaches to cover your requirements. In addition to technical expertise, our focus on business processes and integration offers the opportunity to develop cross-interface concepts together with you. Our Finance Team supports you in all areas of SAP accounting from general ledger accounting to special solutions for IFRS16 or intercompany reconciliation.

The foundation is laid for a future-proof and scalable solution in finance, especially with the transition to S/4HANA. PIKON supports you on your path from the design to implementation of individual modules in finance and connection to upstream systems and applications. The past few years have shown that major upheavals are also to be expected in the financial sector. E.g. companies are increasingly being exposed to growing requirements in tax reporting. PIKON has bundled a team of experts in the Competence Center for Legal Requirements to be able to respond flexibly to these legal changes. We analyse the changes and support you in complying with the requirements. In addition to implementing standard solutions in finance, our portfolio of solutions also includes products especially for this area.

Our Finance Team deals, among other things, with the following business management issues and their implementation in the SAP system:

Structuring and designing external accounting
Parallel accounting under IFRS and local law
Introducing segment reporting
Optimising and speeding up the month-end closing process
Introducing new features in finance
Introducing and rolling out S/4HANA
Supporting existing systems
Complying with legal requirements
Real-time reporting (profit centre reporting, reporting according to the cost-of-sales method)
Data migration

Controlling

The main task of controlling is planning, managing and controlling the company’s divisions. This is where the data from different areas such as financial accounting, sales, purchasing and production converge. You can only steer your company in the right direction if the data is reliable and correct. In addition to recording the actual costs to the various cost units, planning is one of the main tasks in controlling. Deviations can be identified by comparing the actual data with the planned data and appropriate measures can be taken. Income statements, such as contribution margin accounting, are used to determine various key figures in order to monitor and control the profitability of individual areas as well as the entire company.

We support you from developing a business concept to implementing this in your SAP system, in accordance with our 3-point consulting approach. Through our process-oriented approach and thinking outside the box, we know the interfaces where interdepartmental coordination is essential. This is particularly important in controlling due to the integration with the other business divisions. Our goal is to create solutions that inspire you and make your life easier.

In controlling, we deal with the following issues, among others:

Designing and introducing overhead cost controlling
Designing and introducing product cost controlling as well as the material ledger
Designing and introducing a controlling concept for all production scenarios (such as make to stock production, make to order production, variant configuration, project production)
Designing and introducing sales order controlling
Designing and introducing production order controlling
Designing and introducing profitability analysis (CO-PA)
Designing and introducing profit centre accounting / segment reporting
Optimising current processes
Introducing new features in controlling
Designing and implementing planning processes
Optimising and speeding up the month-end closing process
Designing and introducing segment reporting
Designing and introducing cost of sales accounting
Balance sheet valuation of production orders, customer orders, projects
Designing and structuring a reliable and transparent reporting system
Data migration

Sales

In terms of globalisation and digitisation, products are becoming more and more customised, delivery times shorter and shorter. Supply chain management is becoming increasingly important but also increasingly difficult. A flood of information has to be processed, filtered according to specific criteria. This is also reflected in the person’s behaviour in the role of the customer. Not only is it required that the order reaches the recipient quickly and on time, but more and more value is being placed on pre-sales and after-sales processes in addition to a smooth flow from order to delivery.

SAP S/4HANA makes it possible to map the entire sales process perfectly, from the pre-sales phase, order management, delivery processing and invoicing to the post-sales phase, and therefore supports meeting customers’ high expectations. Many process steps can be automated to speed up sales processes.

Sales is closely linked to Warehouse Management in the SAP system. As a result, the sales employee can check the availability of goods at any time, view the goods movements and arrange the best delivery date. A continuous overview of key sales figures such as revenue or orders on hand in SAP S/4HANA enables risks and fluctuations to be identified at an early stage. This information can be used as a basis for strategic decisions.

When creating invoices, the SAP system offers close cooperation with the financial accounting department. Invoices are created in the system and automatically forwarded to the accounting department. It is also possible to monitor payment orders, check a customer’s credit limit and easily process returns and complaints.

Production

Production planning and control are of key importance to industrial companies. Products are becoming more and more customised, delivery times are getting shorter and shorter, and the ever faster paced market demands possibilities to react quickly.

From series to single-item production, SAP’s PP module offers you all the tools a company needs to efficiently map its own production processes. SAP PP contains the scheduling, quantity and spatial planning of production processes as well as their control and monitoring. With the help of this module, you can represent interrelated production processes on the system side.

In S/4HANA, you benefit in the PP module from optimised MRP through the new MRP Live as well as from the re-integration of SCM features, among other things. Read more details in our blog article on MRP Live .

Make-to-order production / variant configuration

Make-to-order production: a process category with an impact on the entire business process

Make-to-order production (configure-to-order to engineer-to-order) provides you with a wide range of possibilities to offer to give your customers exactly the right product from a broad spectrum. Make-to-order production is not just a “simple” production strategy, but a process category that has an impact on the entire business process. New perspectives open up in sales as well as in purchasing or controlling.

The right use of these processes can increase transparency in the process flow and significantly reduce throughput times. Variant configuration in particular offers huge potential and helps avoid the significantly more complex project process wherever possible.

Variant configuration allows you to define a product in a wide range of variants on the basis of characteristics and characteristic values. Based on the selected specification, the system automatically determines the relevant master data used for the rest of the process. This allows master data to be reduced and business processes to be accelerated, among other things.

Our development team customizes your system

Find out if we have already created an add-on that fits your needs. Or contact us so we can tailor-make a solution for you.

Purchasing

For several years now, economists and business experts have been observing how the position of purchasing and procurement is changing within organisations. In the context of globalisation and the resulting cross-border value chains, purchasing is assuming an increasingly strategic key function in companies. In addition to operational and executive activities, new, more long-term and value-added areas of responsibility are emerging for purchasing. Of course, it is only understandable that this has also changed the requirements for IT and software solutions. At the same time, we have new opportunities to meet these market expectations and requirements as part of digitisation.

For example, SAP S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement adds a whole new set of useful functions to familiar and popular features. As a result, SAP S/4HANA helps you answer fundamental questions such as:

How can I optimise my purchasing and procurement processes?
How do I organise value-based, scalable and compliant procurement?
How do I promote flexibility and transparency across my entire value chain?
How can I improve the risk management of my supply chain?

With the S/4HANA system, SAP is offering two fundamental modules to support your purchasing processes:

S/4HANA Central Procurement provides the necessary functions to meet the requirements of centralised procurement across multiple SAP ERP systems. In addition to creating comprehensive purchase orders and contracts, you can also use centralised analysis functions.

S/4HANA Sourcing & Procurement offers all the fundamental functions that you may already know and appreciate from SAP ERP MM. The new Sourcing & Procurement module stands out above all due to the new user-friendly Fiori apps. Some functions were also taken from supplier management, such as supplier evaluation, and improved.

To sum up, it is clear that SAP S/4HANA Sourcing & Procurement can help your purchasing departments meet new challenges. We assist you with years of experience and in-depth expertise in S/4HANA implementations to map and optimise your purchasing processes in the new software.

To ensure that you are in the best possible position for price negotiations with suppliers, we have developed the fully integrated SAP add-on Buyer’s Cockpit.

Buyer's Cockpit

... more than just a cockpit for SAP purchasing info records

The PIKON Buyer’s Cockpit supports buyers with their price history analysis and their negotiations with suppliers.

Service

Designing service processes in the ERP system

Selling products is only a starting point for developing the service business. Today, there is a shift towards sold services and reliability in their delivery. Many companies see great growth potential for the future in this area. Instead of selling the customer a drill and accessories, for example, I offer them the ability to produce a defined number of holes in a period of time. Everything they need for this is provided, from devices to accessories and services in the event of damage as well as predictive service based on data from the IoT. The change to the business model also requires new business processes in the ERP system, in which the individual processes such as sales or service are integrated into a comprehensive business process.

It is important to keep both the interests of the end customer and those of the various internal stakeholders such as sales, the service department and controlling, in mind here. The internal processes must be designed perfectly. We are happy to discuss challenges such as efficient installed base management, optimising processes in field service or on the construction site, or implementing calculable and timely in-house repairs and design them together with you in your ERP landscape. Spare parts management also has new challenges that need to be addressed in the ERP system.

SAP S/4HANA

Are you facing the challenge of developing a digital roadmap? We support you in all phases of digitisation.

Project System

The Project System (PS) offers solutions for mechanical and plant engineering as well as for all those who want to offer their customers customised products.

It combines the typical controlling requirements in this area, such as project costing or unvalued inventories, with the complex logistical processes in the “batch size 1” environment (project planning, technical purchasing). The PS module is strongly linked to the other core modules and offers a range of solutions for project-specific issues.

Due to its many years of experience, PIKON knows the challenges of the project business: the requirements of small to complex projects, the issues in corporate controlling and logistics. PIKON helps you find the best project process for your company and to map it in SAP ERP.

PS supports you with:

The commercial and logistical structuring of your projects
Scheduling and capacity planning
Project realisation
Cost and budget planning
Accounting valuation of projects according to different accounting standards
A target group-specific project reporting system
And many other features for your projects

ERP-Support

We take care of the support in the ERP environment to relieve your IT and specialist departments. This leaves you more time for strategic tasks, such as digitalisation and the important current challenges, such as process optimisations or complex transformation projects (e.g. S/4HANA implementation), etc.

Support in the area of ERP includes in particular:

Processing of tickets in all common SAP ERP modules
Supporting key users with questions and problems in daily business (2nd and 3rd level support)
Consulting and conceptual design for process optimisations and functional enhancements in the ERP environment.

Outsourcing ERP support to PIKON offers you the greatest possible freedom. This because of a high degree of scalability in our services and the availability of staff within the framework of the SLA agreement.

You can find all information about our support and application management here.

Support and Application Management

Our services cover everything from simple user support to complete application management services.

Our references

In 27 years, we have successfully accompanied numerous customers on their path to digitisation.

With PIKON, we have a consultant with whom we can further develop our strategic concepts against the backdrop of digitalisation and, at the same time, a strong partner for the conversion to S/4HANA as the digital core of our business processes. The PIKON 3-Point-Consulting-Approach helps to win over the people at Putzmeister for the corresponding changes.

Dr. Christian Danninger
CFO, Putzmeister Holding GmbH