Boulanger achieves SAP applications upgrade in just four months with offshored solution from IBM Global Business Services

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Established in 1954 and headquartered in Lesquin, Boulanger is a major French distributor of consumer electronics, multimedia, small domestic appliances and white goods. Boulanger operates under several brand names and through a variety of channels: from traditional retail to e-commerce to direct service. The group has more than 100 stores in France and a growing presence in Spain, employing 5,500 people and generating annual revenues of around €1 billion.

Boulanger had been using SAP applications for several years, initially implementing a solution for supply chain management and later extending it to cover the accounting and finance functions. This solution had required numerous custom developments and extensions, and Boulanger felt that the time had come to move to the latest versions of SAP applications – partly to reduce maintenance costs by having a more standardized environment and partly to enable new functionality available from SAP.

“The old solution had reached its limits, and we still had a great number of additional projects to pursue,” says Patrick Perret, Director of Research at Boulanger. “To fulfill the potential of our SAP environment, and enable new functionality, we needed to migrate from our existing SAP R/3 4.5B environment to SAP ERP 6.0.”

Choosing an external project partner

Boulanger has a skilled IT team, and internal motivation for migrating the SAP applications was high. However, the team lacked specific experience of SAP application upgrades, and it was clear that the volume of work to be completed would over-stretch internal resources. As an additional challenge, the company had more than 1,500 custom developments for the SAP environment, all of which would need to be migrated to the latest version and thoroughly tested.

There was also an extremely tight deadline for the migration: Boulanger identified a single weekend in the entire year when the switch to the new software could take place without disrupting normal business activities.

“As the initial stage in the project, we upgraded our server environment, installing five new IBM System p servers,” says Eric Vaneenoo, Technical Director at Boulanger. “This left just four months ahead of the planned change-over weekend in which to complete all the preparation and testing for the migration.”

IBM Global Business Services proposed an innovative solution, combining local project management expertise with highly skilled IBM offshore software developers based in India. The IBM proposal included full, end-to-end project management and a total commitment to meeting the deadline at a fixed cost. Boulanger had not used the outsourcing model before, and the IBM proposal successfully convinced the company to take its first steps in this area.

Given the limited time available, Boulanger opted to halt all new development during the four months of preparation leading up to the migration, and to freeze the functional scope of the new solution. IBM Global Business Services helped to reassure the Boulanger management that the migration could be achieved with no disruption to business-as-usual.

“On the business side, the need to freeze the functional scope was one of the biggest challenges in the project,” says Patrick Perret. “Our teams in the stores, in procurement, in finance and in services constantly request changes and updates to the SAP environment. We needed to convince the business of the long-term value in postponing such requests until after the migration to the latest version.”

Gearing up for go-live

Preparations for the upgrade required the mobilization of a large number of experts – 20 in Boulanger, and 16 in IBM – 13 of whom were located in India. The local IBM team coordinated the project, using the SAP Solution Manager application to orchestrate all the project stages.

A significant challenge for the offshore team was the lack of internal documentation on Boulanger’s existing SAP application environment, and in particular the more than 1,500 specially developed pieces of software. Where documentation was available, it was in French, as was the application itself. Patrick Perret comments: “Adapting software requires a wealth of documentation, and our internal document base was practically non-existent.”

The IBM India consultants handled around 80 per cent of the total development effort, adapting and strengthening the custom-built code and carrying out unit testing on the new version of the SAP applications. The newly tested software was sent back to Boulanger in batches, where the internal specialists tested it again in a duplicate of the real production environment. The project steering committee, jointly staffed by IBM and Boulanger, met between each phase of the project: diagnostics, testing, cookbook, final preparation, go-live.

The IBM France consultants brought specialized methodologies and toolsets to the project, enabling the offshore development team to work in close cooperation with the Boulanger team.

For its part, Boulanger organized training for the IT teams, selected and batched up the custom software for migration, and designed and validated the functional tests. In addition to directly handling some of the more complex and time-constrained elements of re-development, the Boulanger team handled communication and training for users.

A regimented solution

The migration itself was managed with military precision. On the completion of the daily batch run on Saturday evening, Boulanger halted the previous environment. The migration began at 3am on the Sunday morning, and was complete by 6am on Monday. By Wednesday morning, all 700 SAP users were live on the new version of the software

“Aside from a brief hiccup – resolved within a couple of hours by an expert from the SAP 24-hour telephone support team – everything ran as planned,” says Eric Vaneenoo. “The combined IBM and Boulanger team successfully completed this complex migration on time and within the expected budget – a testament to the strength of the project planning and execution by IBM Global Business Services.”

Jacques Honoré, Director of IT and Logistics at Boulanger, adds: “The experience was a complete success, the objectives were achieved precisely, and above all, the integration of the IBM Global Business Services and Boulanger teams was excellent. As a result, the migration took exactly the planned 36 hours, and there was no negative impact on normal business operations.”

Powerful, reliable infrastructure

The new SAP software production environment is split across six IBM System p servers: a p5-570 with twelve IBM POWER5 processors runs the database, while five p5-510 servers, each with two POWER5+ processors, run the application servers. The development and quality assurance environments each occupy one logical partition of an IBM System p5 550Q with eight POWER5+ processors.

Jacques Honoré comments: “The IBM System p platform offers an excellent combination of performance, flexibility and reliability, with low total cost of ownership.”

Opening up new horizons

The frozen functional scope necessary to achieve the four-month project deadline meant that there was no new functionality available to users on the day of the go-live. Nevertheless, the migration produced immediate benefits in terms of improved performance and stability, reduced maintenance costs, and much improved system documentation. In addition to having a clearer, better planned and more robust IT environment, Boulanger can now build new SAP application functionality and benefit from the new technical architecture of the software.

“Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is something we’re looking at closely,” says Eric Vaneenoo. “We’re not yet using the extensive integration capabilities of the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, but we’re exploring how best to deploy them for peripheral applications such as e-commerce, GRC [governance, risk and compliance] and decision-support.”

Boulanger is currently using the new SAP applications to improve its management of upstream and downstream supply chain processes and to improve group-wide procurement. The company is also planning to use SAP ERP to introduce new CRM capabilities for Web and services activities, together with improved after-sales support.

The offshoring advantage

By selecting IBM Global Business Services as its external partner for the migration to SAP ERP 6.0, Boulanger gained the experience and expertise required for a successful project delivery. IBM and Boulanger developed an excellent working relationship, with a strong shared understanding of the goals for the migration. Combined with the ability of the offshore development team to accomplish the majority of the development work, the rigorous approach to project management and the professionalism showed by the local IBM team ensured the right outcome for Boulanger.

“The combination of internal and external expertise was a key success factor for the migration,” recalls Patrick Perret. “We set up a ‘war room’ to ensure complete cohesion between the Boulanger and IBM Global Business Services teams, and we did a great deal of work in the background to keep the business and our users informed about progress. The users themselves put in a great deal of valuable work in testing and validating the new solution.”

The use of offshore resources was a first for Boulanger – and the positive experience makes it likely that the company will work in the same way on future projects. One such project may be the migration of the Boulanger e-commerce platform, which could be partly or wholly accomplished using the IBM offshore resources.

“During the project, we were able to focus on validating the work being done in India, and the implementation of the most technically complex aspects of the solution,” says Jacques Honoré. “The ability of the remote development team to scale up to meet the demands of the project gave us a great deal of flexibility.”

Patrick Perret adds, “There are challenges to be considered when working with offshore teams: the lack of direct, face-to-face contact makes it vital to apply rigor in project management and to have formalized communication channels. Equally, the small time difference means that it pays to organize working schedules carefully. The offshore model worked particularly well for our SAP migration project – using the IBM offshore resources, we achieved what was seemingly an impossible deadline. Also, our partners in India now have a detailed understanding of our SAP applications environment – which will be a major boost for any future projects we may undertake.”