Jacqueline Grunwald is VP and CIO of AdvanSix, a diversified chemistry company headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey.
Upon joining AdvanSix, Grunwald established a modernization strategy for the company’s IT landscape, migrating 95% of the company’s applications to the public cloud. Grunwald continues to drive digital transformation across the organization alongside her team by leveraging contemporary solutions and innovation.
Previously, she spent 17 years with Honeywell, where she held positions of increasing responsibility across the transportation systems business and corporate functions. Before joining Honeywell, Grunwald held several roles at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), including system design and development, configuration management, and database administration. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an MBA in Supply Chain and Business Information Systems from Michigan State University.
Grunwald recently sat down with ASUG Executive Exchange to share best practices and recommendations when working on a large-scale SAP transformation. These include planning for contingencies and dedicating a full-time team for better alignment and change management. Grunwald advises business leaders to select systems integrators (SIs) that deeply understand their industries and that offer flexibility while leveraging SAP’s resources, including demo environments and customer support.
Below, Grunwald also discusses AdvanSix’s SAP S/4HANA journey, keys for successful change management, and the primacy of clean data.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q. Let’s start by discussing AdvanSix’s SAP S/4HANA journey. What was your business case for implementation, and what have been your biggest accomplishments to date?
We’ve been running our ECC instance for 25 years, originally implemented when we were part of a larger organization. However, it no longer meets our needs. To address this, we opted for a greenfield S/4 implementation, giving us the opportunity to implement a system that enables our business.
By following chemical industry best practices, we are able to achieve this with a clean-core approach, avoiding unnecessary customizations. To date, we have not approved any customizations to the core, and our clean-core dashboard reflects just 0.2% customization. This approach has allowed us to simplify processes and focus on what matters most.
We’re also improving our SAP landscape by leveraging SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) in SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) for connections (internal and with partners), advancing our data and analytics capability with SAP Datasphere, adding testing capabilities, and strengthening training with EnableNow. Our goal is to create an S/4HANA environment that supports our organization well into the future—through upgrades, role transitions of our employees, and evolving business needs.
After we go live across our sites in Q2, we plan to perform an upgrade in the second half of the year. Looking ahead, we are eager to explore Joule and other new capabilities.
Our biggest successes are maintaining the clean core as well as our initial implementation in 2023 for two of our smaller sites. We had the opportunity to begin our S/4HANA journey with the integration of an acquisition; this allowed us to onboard the new entity within six months while learning from the experience before rolling out the system to our larger sites.
These early learnings helped refine our approach, ensuring strong team and organizational engagement for a robust implementation that fully leverages the core capabilities of S/4HANA. We began with a comprehensive process review, focused on how to best optimize, using external experts (outside of our SI).
Q: What challenges have you faced throughout the SAP S/4HANA implementation, and how have you overcome them?
The project spans over 18 months—long enough that several core team members, including a business process owner, have made career transitions during the implementation period. Managing resource turnover has been our biggest challenge, but with strong organizational commitment, we have successfully found replacements. We’ve kept the project on track and even brought fresh perspectives that added value to the project.
The other challenge has been data. Despite conducting a master data cleansing project ahead of implementation, data loading has revealed numerous issues, taking nearly 2x the time planned and consuming our contingency. To mitigate this, we worked with our SI to bring in more experienced resources, increase the percentage of data loaded early in the project, and resolve issues sooner.
Like any large-scale initiative, we’ve faced additional hurdles—resources that did not work out, personal issues, and personality conflicts. However, through collaboration with our SI, we have managed through each issue with flexibility and thoughtfulness. We are not live yet, and there will undoubtedly be more challenges ahead, but we are confident in our ability to overcome them.
Q: How are you approaching change management to ensure smooth employee and stakeholder transitions?
We recognize that we may have oversimplified aspects of change management, but our focus remains on robust, consistent communication and training. Training has been a key priority, starting in our second round of acceptance testing, where we engaged a broader group across the organization to test and provide feedback.
To ensure effective training, we are working with a training partner separate from our SI. Training is being structured within EnableNow and incorporating a variety of resources, including training tools, overviews, comprehensive training and reference guides, etc. Completion of relevant training is required for individuals to receive their role-based access—an essential step to ensuring process longevity.
We also plan to leverage SAP Signavio, once we are live, to monitor how well the system and processes are functioning. This will help us identify areas that need further reinforcement and ensure long-term adoption.
Q: What strategies are you using to optimize analytics and integrate SAP Datasphere effectively within your new system?
First, clean data. We worked with Prometheus to leverage their machine learning tools to scrub our business partner and material data ahead of the go-live and to maintain data quality moving forward.
S/4HANA offers significantly more built-in analytics capabilities. As part of our initial process work, we assessed which reports were important for gaining insight into and oversight of each process. We then prioritized what could be addressed first in S/4HANA, using out-of-the-box functionality. To support additional reporting needs, we built data structures in Datasphere, with much of our visualization being developed in PowerBI.
Our partner in SAP Datasphere has been Avvale, which has helped us to better understand the capabilities of Datasphere. And while we have not yet leveraged it, we recognize that Signavio can address reporting needs, so we plan to explore its potential further after go-live.
Q: What key lessons and critical takeaways can you share from your journey?
- Plan for contingency. Things will go wrong; plan for it. Build flexibility into your schedule to accommodate unexpected challenges.
- Invest in a fully dedicated team. Our project team consists of a small IT team working in tight partnership with our business partner owner team—all fully dedicated to this project, from inception through post go-live. This is a huge investment for an organization of our size. We saw the difference between part-time and full-time engagement in our pilot, with the latter delivering more aligned solutions and more robust change management. This resource investment will allow us to get the most out of our new S/4HANA capabilities.
- Choose an SI that truly wants to be your partner. There will always be some misalignment between your incentives and those of your SI; minimize friction by selecting the right partner. Your SI should understand your industry, take the time to deeply understand your business, and be flexible in their approach to accommodate you while still providing clear and capable thought leadership and execution.
- Leverage SAP’s resources—without extra cost. SAP offers many resources that you can leverage, without spending more. Take advantage of all those resources and demand the support you need. Get to know deeply what services your contract entitles you to and ask what else SAP can do to support the success of your implementation. SAP will set up a demo S/4HANA environment for you, which your team can use to learn and explore. If you don’t have any other way to create a pilot, at least do that. Additionally, our assigned customer office resource has been a godsend in helping us connect the dots on many capabilities across platforms, recommending or gathering feedback on partners, ensuring we get the support we need, and making endless recommendations.
- Clean your data\—and keep it clean. As noted previously, clean your data first and ensure you can keep it clean. Although we don’t have SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) implemented, we used a third-party cleansing tool to de-duplicate data and ensure attributes. All new data continues to run through this tool reactively to maintain cleanliness. You can’t cleanse your data too much; for all our efforts on this, I am still shocked by the number of data errors that persist. If I could go back in time to 25 years ago, I would implement strong master data governance from the start.
- Deeply evaluate your organizational processes before design. Take the time to map out how your processes will be enabled by S/4HANA, prioritizing simplification and standard capabilities. Ensure your team fully understands both current processes and how they can function in S/4HANA. If you have regulatory obligations, align your control framework accordingly, as this will likely lag behind the design phase. With a deep understanding of what can be automated in S/4HANA (and GRC), look carefully at how you can eliminate and simplify controls. Don’t let this be an untapped benefit.
- Implement role-based access from the start. If you are not already doing so, be intentional about only providing access by role. Our current support team spends an inordinate amount of time on IAM. We are simplifying access and requiring training completion before any access can be granted.
- Utilize the SAP tools included in your entitlements. We are leveraging several SAP tools within our entitlements, such as managing our project in SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), SAP Signavio, and other places.
Reflections contained herein do not constitute AdvanSix’s endorsement of name supplier services or deliverables.