’s-Hertogenbosch, 21 april 2020 – Leaseweb is streamlining its business processes with SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C). The hosting provider is thus laying the foundation for further growth with a consistent customer experience.
Dutch-based Leaseweb provides the IT infrastructure companies need to keep a site, service or solution up and running. The portfolio includes dedicated servers, web hosting, cybersecurity, content delivery networks and various cloud services.
“We are particularly strong in Infrastructure as a Service,” says CTO Svenja de Vos. The company’s technical foundation includes tens of thousands of servers located in 20 data centers.
Harmonizing business processes
In recent years, the company experienced strong growth. Leaseweb operates worldwide. Not only in Europe, but also in Singapore, Australia and the United States. With that international expansion comes globalization of processes, so that the same way of working is done in all countries and customers have the same experience everywhere.
To further harmonize and standardize global business processes, the choice fell on the combination of SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) for customer service. The underlying hardware is from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). About the choice of HPE, De Vos can be brief: “HPE’s hardware offers the best performance and stability we need.”
The best people
Leaseweb itself took the lead in implementing the new SAP solutions, supported by several SAP partners, including its key partner Quinso. “A project stands or falls on the quality of the people you involve,” De Vos said. “For this project, we brought in knowledgeable consultants from Quinso. But as Leaseweb, we remain in the lead.”
When Leaseweb began implementation in Germany, it did not yet have a template or best practice as an example. De Vos: “We are the first hosting company in the world to implement SAP. We are therefore the best practice. After rolling out SAP ECC and SAP C4C in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, we now have a very mature template that we can roll out.”
“We gradually made that template more and more professional, from high-level design to realization. In previous implementations, Quinso has taken the template to the next level,” said Dick Verburg, managing partner and business consultant at Quinso. “As a result, the gap between the template and practice became smaller and smaller.” Business confidence at Leaseweb is such that a rollout of the template in Asia is a reality. The robustness of the solution even allows remote deployment in Asia. De Vos: “That might be the first fully remote SAP implementation.”
Walk-through processes shorter
Leaseweb is already reaping the benefits of the new solutions. De Vos: “Because we do almost everything in SAP – the entire administration – the turnaround processes are shorter. An online order for a server, for example, becomes a service order in SAP, after which that server is automatically delivered. In other words, orders are entered properly, which means we have less work in the data center and can deliver faster, and thus a satisfied customer.”
“But we also have more insight into our data that allows us to be even more responsive,” De Vos continued. “Moreover, I can see as we speak how inventory, sales and orders are doing in, say, Germany or the United States. We could already do that, but now at an even more detailed level.”
Leaseweb hopes to fully complete the implementation of SAP ECC and SAP C4C by early 2021. “After that, we’ll see what further process optimizations we can implement,” De Vos concludes. “And in my head, I’m already working on a migration to SAP S/4HANA.” Leaseweb will again carefully plan that migration. “We are already using SAP HANA databases. So the basis is already there.”
