BCI Consulting
Ensuring Success in SAP Implementations with Innovation

Companies looking to make their businesses more agile, digital, and competitive often jump into an SAP project without conducting enough due diligence and planning. Consequently, many SAP implementations turn unsuccessful, forcing companies to pull the plug on their implementations. Organizations choose SAP because of its longstanding reputation and broad industry focus. However, that alone cannot make an SAP project successful; companies need to implement a well-structured plan to become successful in their SAP projects. So how do companies implement a successful digital transformation with SAP?

Enter BCI Consulting, an IT and Business consulting firm with a direct presence in four countries. The company brings value-added solutions to meet customers’ strategic and operational needs and align them with key digital trends. BCI Consulting combines its extensive experience, pragmatism, and execution strategies to address customers’ challenges and make them more competitive. In a conversation with CIO Applications,André Leite, Partner and CEO of the company, discusses its solutions and their efficacy at length.

Could you share us with a brief overview of BCI Consulting?

BCI consulting is an IT consulting company specialized in SAP. We were born in Argentina 9 years ago and, since we bought a company in Brazil in 2016, our main operation is in Sao Paulo. BCI Consulting covers the Latin American market through 5 offices in 4 countries, and we are one of the most trusted and reputed SAP partners in the region, with the 2nd largest Enterprise Support customer base. Headed by three shareholders with more than 20 years in the SAP ecosystem, we employ a team of senior managers and certified SAP consultants with expertise in more than 20 SAP solutions, from the digital core to line of business, being recognized by ISG Provider Lens as a leader in the S/4HANA Quadrant and by SAP as the “#1 Move to S/4HANA”.

We provide business transformation through SAP, from licensing, application maintenance and implementation services, also augment the SAP solutions by delivering complementary products. We are very proud to serve about 110 active customers spread across ten countries in Latin America and other 8 global clients from US and Europe.

Also, as we understand the Latin American market better than anyone, being able to address the challenges associated with legislation, taxation, cultural and labor differences, making us a perfect partner for companies trying to digitally transform their business utilizing SAP solutions and keeping their business ahead of the innovation curve.

Could you walk me through BCI Consulting’s typical customers?

BCI Consulting works with several market industries, and we cater to the requirements of a large clientele who face diverse challenges with SAP. We serve a diverse clientele, especially customers in the upper-middle market. For BCI Consulting, a typical customer is an organization that makes from a hundred million dollars in revenue to billions. We have extensive experience implementing SAP solutions and technologies for companies in manufacturing, automobile, agribusiness, consumer products, retail, logistics, pharma/chemical, construction, among others. In addition, BCI Consulting has on boarded many references in analytics, customer experience, supply chain, AI/RPA, human capital, and more.

How does BCI Consulting identify its clients’ challenges and requirements?

Clients often approach us with diverse challenges. While some want to switch from a legacy ERP system to SAP technology, others struggle with their existing ERP projects. In either case, we understand the client’s existing business needs and the underlying technology that powers their systems before we deploy an offer with SAP solutions.

As we understand that customers are not alike, we deploy a personalized solution that fits the client’s needs. In doing so, we use KPIs, real examples, business cases, project financing and proof of concepts to convince our customers of the benefits they receive by implementing SAP solutions and how it could transform the client’s business processes.

Since SAP introduced the HANA platform, migrating from the old ECC platform to the new one is an uphill task for many customers. BCI Consulting plans the migration to SAP S/4HANA for companies of any size or maturity levels in adoption of cloud solutions. Before executing the migration process, we apply a toolkit to analyze, evaluate and propose a better way to do it smoothly and in a safe transition, considering a diverse set of individual factors. This phase is the “Roadmap to Evolution”, which allows us to understand the migration with minimum risk, ensure business continuity without disruption, setting the right expectations and establishing a partnership with process owners.

In cases of regional projects, such as rollouts of global templates, our regional presence allows us to leverage the knowledge of our Competence Centers, which are centralized as a hub in one or more countries, performing the right methodology steps to guarantee local adherence together with global standards and compliance.

Could you throw some light on BCI Consulting’s approach to S/4HANA migration?

We feature a broad portfolio of SAP solutions to help our clients navigate their diverse business scenarios. BCI Consulting serves national and multinational companies of various industries that leverage integrated corporate management systems, IoT (SAP innovation portfolio), IA/RPA and the human capital management platform.

These solutions are aimed on providing greater agility to organizations in the digital transformation era. For example, the “Roadmap to Evolution” is a personalized approach to S/4HANA migration, using a collaborative design thinking approach to focus on the client’s pain points, improvements, decision process, governance, user experience and productivity.

Our toolkit has five SAP official tools: Transformation Navigator, Business Scenario Recommendations, Readiness Check, Call Monitor and Pathfinder. We have applied this solution before the implementation of 16 successful S/4HANA projects. Also, we feature an SAP Activate Agile Methodology, which is a fusion of SAP Activate waterfall with an Agile methodology.

Could you walk me through some of the core capabilities of BCI Consulting?

Now, the mainstream is the move from SAP ECC to the new “RISE with SAP”, which is a new subscription service offering that combines S/4HANA Cloud with a set of products and services. For Brownfield or Bluefield projects, we can use our Conversion Factory S/4HANA solution, providing support with the usage of our Sandbox S/4HANA 2020 and allowing POCs or prototypes.

For Greenfield or new implementations, we have certified vertical solutions covering S/4HANA best practices for pharmaceutical companies and consumer packaged goods companies.

Beyond the experience in SAP projects and solutions, BCI Consulting follows best practices to build several effective, efficient, and achievable solutions using SAP BTP (former SCP).

U-RPA is a solution developed to leverage the SAP Artificial Intelligent package with Machine Learning, for automating S/4HANA user acceptance tests or even real-time execution of several flows in Procure-to-Pay, Financials and Order-to-Cash processes.

Another solution is called U-PIX, to process real-time payments and money transfers. The product aims at bridging the current gaps in payment methods as it works on the Brazilian Open Banking.

BCI Consulting features yet another product called U-Budget. The product offers Fiori Apps to follow up and manage plans VS real business scenarios. Customers can use the product to visualize detailed modeling and forecasting information for performing in-depth analyses. The product gives customers a deeper understanding of the influencing factors that determine the forecasted business scenarios.

How do you build and maintain an active talent pool?

BCI Consulting owns Learning Hub from SAP, which we leverage to provide SAP technical training for thousands of courses. Through the learning hub, we are sponsoring a massive certification process called “you pass, we pay” and we have achieved formal certifications for consultancy services, technical and sales in over 23 SAP core and LoB solutions: Analytics, Ariba, Success Factors, IBP, C/4HANA, TMS, BTP, IBP, etc.

To bring talents with an innovative mindset, we reach aspiring developers and technology enthusiasts in collaboration with UFSCAR (University of São Carlos, Brazil), a recognized institution in IT field. By doing so, we can get candidates to develop their technical careers and skills in our Competency Center, starting in application management and product development but evolving to consulting, implementation or business solutions.

What does the future hold for BCI Consulting?

We are expanding our business beyond the Latin American region. We have already a commercial office in Miami/US, but it was opened few weeks before the pandemic, so we are going to restart. Also, we have been working with two partners in Austria and Germany and we decided to open new offices in Spain and Portugal until the end of this year. One of the shareholders is moving to Barcelona and we will become SAP VAR in those countries to leverage our in-house solutions that complement SAP with packetized S/4HANA qualified solutions, taking advantage of our expertise in vertical sectors and offering “near-shore” cloud services together with our team in Latin America.

We have established a long term and strong relationship with SAP globally so, we want to stay close, collaborating with them to help our clients stay ahead of the curve. We are ready and stronger than ever, bringing innovation and serving our base and new customers efficiently.