ERP Implementation for a Manufacturing Enterprise

Pinewood's finance team closed the books on a 14-day cycle that was increasingly missing the audit committee's deadline. Each acquired entity ran its own chart of accounts, its own product hierarchy, and -- in the case of the Wuhan operation -- its own Mandarin-only general ledger that the corporate consolidation team translated by hand into the parent COA every month.

Beyond finance, the operational pain was acute:

• Inventory accuracy hovered around 87% across the network, with $42M in annual write-offs
• The two ECC instances were on EHP6 and EHP7 respectively -- both within a year of mainstream maintenance ending
• A 2027 European CSRD reporting deadline meant the existing patchwork of spreadsheets would not pass audit
• Three of the 17 plants ran process orders on shop-floor whiteboards, with ERP receipts entered the next morning

An earlier abandoned ERP project from 2022 had left the executive team skeptical, so the engagement had to demonstrate value continuously rather than in a single big-bang go-live two years out.

TekNinjas delivered an S/4HANA 2023 implementation on RISE with SAP, using SAP Activate methodology with a strong Fit-to-Standard preference. The program was structured as four overlapping go-live waves with a shared global template established and frozen in month 5.

Global template and design

A 22-person joint design team locked the global chart of accounts (a single 8-segment structure), a harmonized material classification, and a global intercompany model in a 16-week design phase. We used SAP Signavio for process discovery on the legacy ECC environments, surfacing 1,400+ process variants -- of which only 280 were retained as legitimate localizations.

Migration and cutover

Master data was harmonized through Stibo MDM with TekNinjas-built reconciliation logic that resolved 4.7 million duplicate material records across the four source systems. Open transactional data migrated through SAP's S/4HANA Migration Cockpit using a custom orchestration we wrote on Azure Data Factory to manage the 39 source-to-target mappings. Each wave's cutover ran over an extended weekend with a four-hour business window for user acceptance and a documented rollback gate.

Shop-floor integration

For the three legacy whiteboard plants, we deployed SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud with handheld receipt confirmation tied to MES-issued process orders. Equipment integration ran through OPC-UA over a hardened industrial DMZ designed jointly with Pinewood's OT team.

Sustained value

A Center of Excellence stood up in month 9 and took primary support ownership at hypercare exit -- staffed by 18 Pinewood team members trained and shadowed by TekNinjas across the engagement.

The fourth and final wave went live on the planned March 2026 date. Hypercare closed 12 weeks later with no Severity 1 incidents open.

• 17 plants and 4 SSCs migrated; 4 legacy ERPs decommissioned
• Month-end close: 14 days -> 4 days, with first-day flash within 18 hours
• Inventory accuracy: 87% -> 99.2% network-wide
• $11.6M reduction in annual working capital from improved inventory turns
• CSRD-ready data lineage validated by external auditor in the first reporting cycle
• Final program cost: 4% above the contracted budget, against an industry average of 47% overrun