Guiomar López García has been in the SAP consultant industry for 20 years, first as a consultant in several consulting companies and then working directly in companies using SAP. During her years of consultancy, she developed in the modules of PP (production planning) and MM (materials management) to senior consultant and then was promoted to Manager, starting to lead teams and projects, with experience in different industries such as Automotive, Pharmacy, Food and Beverage, Electronics manufacturing, etc. As part of the business, she has been in positions of high responsibility: for nine years she was the IT and SAP Director of North America for the Adler Pelzer Group (Automotive Tier 1 supplier, leader in the industry), in this position she had to lead also in Infrastructure area which was not her core until that moment, and ensure the reliability of the IT and systems for the whole region, along with the improvement of the business processes in SAP. In her current position as Global SAP Director, centrally located in Europe, also for the Adler Pelzer Group, she leads a team of 20 SAP and EDI internal specialists, to support the SAP financial, logistics and manufacturing operations for 50+ plants in Europe, North and South America, along with the needed implementations of new plants to be migrated in SAP or change requests demanded by the internal business or by their partners. In the Automotive Industry, a close collaboration with the customers (in the case of APG, almost every OEM is a customer) is fundamental, as it is always needed to apply the new standards required by them, especially in the EDI messages transmission and in all the Supply Chain Management requirements.

Through this article, López García shares her insights on the new trends and challenges in implementing SAP in the Automotive industry.

Can you explain the different challenges companies face while implementing SAP?

The foundation for successful SAP implementation rests not only on the expertise of a competent technical team but, more importantly, on the active involvement of key users within the company. Often, businesses may not have sufficient personnel equipped to handle the complexities of SAP implementation, or they might mistakenly believe that the responsibility for a successful implementation lies solely with SAP consultants. This is a misconception. The true determinant of success is the engagement of key users who will maintain the system postimplementation.

The most significant challenge for companies lies in maintaining the quality of master data, even when copying from a legacy system other than SAP. When migrating from one system to another, it is crucial to gather and perform the cleansing of the master data. This process demands considerable time, and inaccuracies arise due to insufficient time allocation. Staying current is an ongoing challenge, given that standards evolve with customer input.

Can you talk about the recent trends you see in the SAP industry?

The current trend is the upgrade from an SAP ECC system to S/4HANA. It is also the main objective of our roadmap. The biggest challenge for this migration to S/4 HANA for our case, is that we have two productive environments in our SAP. One is for the traditional APG plants that have had our SAP since many years ago. The other is dated from mid-2022, which we created to migrate in our SAP the plants that the Adler Pelzer Group acquired from Faurecia.

This second environment was implemented in order to be able to migrate the data in a faster way. As we could copy exactly the material numbers, vendors codes, customers code, etc, all the codification for organizational structure and master data was respected, to perform this migration in a record time, as eight plants were migrated to our SAP environment in less than one year.

 Engaging as a consultant in various offices across different sectors and countries proved advantageous to my career. This experience allows one to analyse and compare the unique challenges encountered by each industry 

In the future, the idea will be to merge these two environments into one, and the plan is that this will happen when we migrate to the S/4HANA. In that moment, we will have to perform a consolidation of the master data between the two environments and their two different codification models.

The automotive industry is hugely using SAP because the manufacturing companies take advantage of all the modules in SAP. And moreover, the key for us in Automotive is the EDI integration and electronic communication with our customers and suppliers, that allows the automatic integration of demands, shipment notifications, invoices, etc., as key for an extremely efficient Supply Chain management, on many occasions based in JIT/JIS (Just in Time / Just in Sequence) requirements. To achieve this, we depend on the EDI electronic messages and the labels on the containers for the parts, that will allow the customer to receive the goods automatically in their systems (normally SAP too). In the Automotive Industry, it is more or less frequent that customers change the guidelines of the EDI transmissions and the labels to be placed in the containers, and a permanent revision of standards is normally needed. Handling unit management is used to take care of the process of the containers sent to our customers and it is a fundamental functionality too for our industry.

What is your advice to young professionals starting a career as an SAP consultant?

I recommend that young professionals engage in diverse industries. Engaging as a consultant in various offices across different sectors and countries proved advantageous to my career. This experience allows one to analyse and compare the unique challenges encountered by each industry. Each sector exhibits its distinct characteristics, and the utilisation of SAP proves essential in all of them. For instance, proficiency in SAP is crucial for roles in the Pharmacy, Retail, Automotive, and other industries.

The effectiveness of SAP consultants is compromised if they confine themselves solely to computer-based tasks. They must comprehend the perspective of key and end users, as their role extends beyond system consultancy to process improvement within the company. A comprehensive understanding of the logistics department's processes is essential to grasp the intricacies of the Supply Chain and Production within the Logistics framework. The real-world activities reflected in SAP are crucial for the system to mirror material movements.

A good SAP consultant must like to help people because, in the end, we are trying to make their work smooth. One should be empathetic with their challenges. If one does not have the experience as a good consultant, they cannot provide the needed leadership.

An SAP manager should understand every member of the team. One should learn about leadership and soft skills as one step up as a manager. A consultant in the implementation manages their module in the SAP world. When one becomes a manager, then takes care of all the modules. Before arriving at the management, one should understand the modules around finance, controlling, sales and distribution, materials management, production planning, etc because it will give the global knowledge of SAP needed in the future.

The foundation for becoming an effective manager is the initial experience gained while working as a consultant. Adequate performance in the consultant role establishes the groundwork for effective management.