• Industrial

The need

The customer, a global power-train manufacturer, entered a joint venture with automotive and industrial partners across separate legal entities. Engineering, prototype and testing effort suddenly had to be shared, tracked and cross-charged between entities that hadn't previously invoiced each other for anything.

Existing processes leaned heavily on manual spreadsheets, individual judgement and reconciliation-after-the-fact. That was tolerable when projects lived inside one company. It stopped being tolerable when every hour, every purchase and every simulation became potentially billable to a partner. Time was lost in the reconciliation, trust was lost in the numbers, and neither could be automated on top of the existing setup.

The business question was not "which project tool should we buy?" It was "how do we make project cost, time and responsibility transparent enough to run inside a joint venture, and automated enough to scale across departments?"

Our solution

S5 worked side by side with the customer to standardise project delivery on SAP S/4HANA Project Systems and CATS. The engagement moved through five explicit workstreams, following the customer's clean-core, agile-improvement philosophy so that future SAP releases could be adopted without re-engineering the setup.

1. Scan, start with the decisions the joint venture actually needs

We mapped the moments where a cross-entity project decision was slow, disputed or manual: quoting a new initiative to a partner, reconciling hours at month-end, approving procurement against a project budget, or explaining a cost overrun. The point was not to catalogue every report. It was to identify the small set of decisions where a lack of trusted numbers was already costing time and credibility.

2. Simplify, one WBS language across departments and entities

We agreed a common WBS structure and responsibility model before configuring anything in SAP. Work centres, network activities and material flows were shaped around how projects are actually run, not around historical spreadsheet quirks. That gave every downstream conversation, procurement, resource planning, billing, close, the same underlying object model.

3. Stack, use standard SAP wherever it already answers the question

Standard S/4HANA Project Systems capabilities were activated first: WBS structures, Network Activities, budget with soft and hard checks, project versioning and simulation, resource-related billing, and procurement and stock management from network activities. CATS was integrated with SAP HCM so that timesheet capture reused the existing HR master and Work Centre setup. Bills of Materials were pulled from PLM into Network Activities rather than duplicated. The clean-core principle stayed intact.

4. Ship, pilot in one department, then extend by design

The rollout started with the customer's Digital departments as a controlled pilot. That gave the joint model time to prove itself against real project work: quoting, planning, capturing hours, checking budgets and generating cross-charges. Once the pilot held, the same setup was extended into R&D and Manufacturing Engineering, using the shared configuration rather than a rebuild.

5. Steward, keep the standard clean as new departments join

An operating model was put in place so that new departments and, over time, new joint-venture flows can be added without re-inventing the WBS, cross-charge logic or CATS setup each time. Governance stays with the customer, S5 remains available as a senior partner when the model has to stretch.

Technologies:

• SAP S/4HANA & ERP core

Results

• Automation replaces reconciliation

  Cross-entity project flows that used to depend on spreadsheets and manual reconciliation now run inside standard SAP. Time capture, budget checks, procurement against network activities, resource-related billing and cross-charges follow one automated path, freeing project managers and finance from the reconciliation work that used to define month-end.

• Time saved where it matters most

  Hours previously spent chasing timesheets, joining spreadsheets and rebuilding cost views collapsed into a single CATS-and-PS flow. That released time back to project leads, controllers and finance, and made month-end shorter and less contested.

• Quality, trust and accuracy across entities

  One WBS structure, one time-capture flow and one budget model gave every stakeholder the same view of a project. Discussions between the customer and joint-venture partners moved from "whose number is right" to "what does the number tell us to do next."

• A standardised base to scale across the organisation

  After a successful pilot in the Digital departments, the same Project Systems and CATS setup is being rolled out to R&D and Manufacturing Engineering. The goal is a single standardised approach to project management across the business, regardless of department, delivering lower cost, higher transparency and a better user experience.