Ardex counts on Islet­ter to your team Insourc­ing service

Describe your base­line at the verge of sys­tem renew­al. Why did you go in for the renewal?

The deci­sion to imple­ment Nordic coun­tries to SAP was done at cor­po­ra­tion lev­el to con­sol­i­date oper­a­tions. All Nordic coun­tries, Dan­ish, Swe­den and Fin­land were imple­ment­ed to SAP simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dur­ing 2018. SAP ware­house man­age­ment, pur­chas­ing, sales and finan­cial man­age­ment were imple­ment­ed. At glob­al lev­el we were already using SAP and now Nordic coun­tries want­ed to be merged into the same system.

What kind of new demands or chal­lenges arose along the sys­tem renew­al? What were you sur­prised at?

The lack of resources was chal­leng­ing. Germany’s IT team didn’t have time to think Finnish process­es, make detailed def­i­n­i­tions nor help to exe­cute all Finnish demands. The time and sup­port had to be pri­or­i­tized also amongst oth­er Nordic coun­tries. For exam­ple, in Den­mark a man­u­fac­tur­ing plant was need­ed to get run­ning and Dan­ish oper­a­tions also went ahead of oth­er countries.

We need­ed to get things going rapid­ly. Time con­sum­ing new process­es, imple­men­ta­tion, old pro­ce­dures, learn­ing as well as how to oper­ate in a new sys­tem com­pared to the old one. It took a lot of time to get every­thing to func­tion and do tech­ni­cal definitions.

The changes brought by this project bur­dened our finance team. Minor SAP know-how com­pli­cat­ed and slowed down issue solv­ing. Invoic­ing got jammed and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion was in dan­ger. Deliv­er­ies were nor­mal­ized quite rapid­ly but pric­ing def­i­n­i­tions were miss­ing what caused prob­lems for infor­ma­tion valid­i­ty in invoic­ing. There were also chal­lenges in cred­it notes and fix­ing cus­tomer invoic­es up-to-date was hard and trou­ble­some. Fur­ther­more, com­mu­ni­ca­tion between Fin­land and Ger­many was already chal­leng­ing due to SAP terminology.

Our orga­ni­za­tion didn’t have enough SAP know-how even though we start­ed recruit­ing new tal­ents already one year before the imple­men­ta­tion. There was no time to cre­ate new ideas or solu­tions. Learn­ing process­es took time and the uti­liza­tion of fea­tures was threat­ened to remain par­tial. Core busi­ness was in dan­ger, so this sit­u­a­tion need­ed to be solved rapidly.

How did you begin to get help with new needs?

Our base­line was to recruit more SAP know-how. We start­ed find­ing a new per­son via recruit adver­tise­ment. Soon we noticed it was very chal­leng­ing to find suit­able tal­ent this way. Islet con­tact­ed us at that time and let us know about oth­er option for our needs. At first, we thought per­ma­nent recruit­ing was the only option for us. After the need map­ping dis­cus­sion and going through the Islet insourc­ing ser­vice mod­el we changed our minds and decid­ed to try this option Islet offered. It turned out to be a suc­cess­ful choice.

How this new sit­u­a­tion was solved?

We chose a com­pe­tent part­ner to accel­er­ate our team to adopt the new sys­tem and max­i­mize its uti­liza­tion. The out­side view­point was ben­e­fi­cial because we want­ed to get excel­lent out­comes right from the start. As a result, we got bet­ter ser­vice, know-how to our orga­ni­za­tion and cost-efficiency.

SAP know-how and per­son­al chemistries were essen­tial. It was also cru­cial that we need­ed a mem­ber to our finan­cial team who had time to look up and inves­ti­gate error sit­u­a­tions occur­ring after the imple­men­ta­tion; why they hap­pened and define them to be fixed by Germany’s IT team. It was also impor­tant to have savvy SAP Spe­cial­ist as a local sup­port in our office show­ing how the sys­tem works and edu­cat­ing us for the most effi­cient ways to use the new system.

How Islet man­aged to help you with these needs?

For two weeks’ notice we man­aged to get a com­pe­tent SAP Spe­cial­ist to be our team mem­ber for four and a half months. This per­son ori­en­tat­ed rapid­ly, was pro­duc­tive and liked col­league. When learn­ing and adapt­ing to new pro­ce­dures, the out­side view­point brought new kind of thoughts and experience.

What kind of changes the sys­tem renew­al brought?

Trans­paren­cy to func­tions in the cor­po­rate lev­el and con­sol­i­da­tion to report­ing. The renew­al brought steadi­ness to our process­es, moti­vat­ed our team to learn and adopt new pro­ce­dures more effi­cient­ly and uni­fied pro­ce­dures both local­ly and at cor­po­rate level.

What kind of con­crete ben­e­fits were achieved?

With the help of Islet our jammed sit­u­a­tion in finan­cial man­age­ment got nor­mal­ized. It was also impor­tant and ben­e­fi­cial that Islet’s com­pe­tent SAP Spe­cial­ist doc­u­ment­ed in com­pre­hen­sive and pre­cise way as well as com­posed good end-user instruc­tions so every­one in our orga­ni­za­tion can use them and pro­ceed with their work.

Pre­vi­ous­ly instruc­tions were at gen­er­al cor­po­ra­tion lev­el that was not detailed enough for every­one to under­stand them. When we took this new pro­ce­dure to use, Islet pro­fes­sion­al edu­cat­ed us, and it worked well. Due to SAP imple­men­ta­tion our pro­ce­dures were opti­mized, and we can now per­form tasks in the sys­tem what we used to per­form in paper of Excel.

Released time from rou­tine tasks can be used now to enhance busi­ness and sup­port man­age­ment deci­sion mak­ing, plan­ning and track­ing busi­ness oper­a­tions’ prof­itabil­i­ty. I see also as a pos­i­tive thing that our finan­cial team’s know-how increased and work­ing meth­ods uni­fied between Nordic coun­tries’ teams.

What are Islet’s strengths to under­take and com­plete change?

On short notice Islet man­aged to give our team SAP Spe­cial­ist who ful­filled our com­pe­tence require­ments and fit­ted to our team. SAP pro­fes­sion­als are had to find, and our need was clear­ly tem­po­rary in ret­ro­spect, so this served our sit­u­a­tion per­fect­ly. Islet’s SAP Spe­cial­ist knew finan­cial man­age­ment work in prac­tice, under­stood our post-project envi­ron­ment and what are the pro­ce­dures in Fin­land. Germany’s IT team sup­port­ed dozens of coun­tries with dif­fer­ent needs and local require­ments for pro­ce­dures. Islet’s SAP Spe­cial­ist knew how to com­mu­ni­cate these needs also at sys­tem lev­el with­in our organization.

“I can warm­ly rec­om­mend our part­ner Islet if you need per­son who is sea­soned by expe­ri­ence to your team. We were high­ly sat­is­fied with the help from Islet.”

Pekka Sin­to­nen, CEO, Ardex

For over 60 years Ardex has been one of the lead­ing solu­tion providers of high-per­for­mance spe­cial­ty build­ing mate­ri­als. Nowa­days Ardex has man­u­fac­tur­ing plants and sales offices in over 50 coun­tries. In Fin­land Ardex prod­ucts have been used by pro­fes­sion­als since 1981. We empha­size the sig­nif­i­cance of edu­ca­tion and that is the rea­son ARDEX Acad­e­my was estab­lished in 1999. It has become one of the most notable edu­ca­tion cen­ters amongst the pro­fes­sion­als in the field.