From a Stalled SAP S/4HANA Program to Production in Six Months at Georgian Railway

Background

Georgian Railway is the country’s national railway operator and one of its largest employers, with around 12,000 employees. It runs three very different businesses inside one company: the rail infrastructure, freight transport, and passenger transport. Each with its own economics, operations, and management needs.

The company set out to replace a mix of disparate systems and processes with a single corporate platform built on SAP S/4HANA.The goal was not just to automate how the company already worked, but to transform its core processes around the best practices built into SAP. The new platform also had to give management a single, real-time source of information, instead of delayed and approximate reporting. SAP S/4HANA would become the system the whole company runs on.

This project was also an early adoption of SAP S/4HANA. The new generation of SAP ERP was still relatively new to the market, with a limited track record of large-scale implementations d, and Georgian Railway was one of the first large enterprises in the region to implement it. The project was later included in SAP’s global list of the 40 most innovative projects.

Challenge

The project originally started in 2015 with a different partner, with go-live planned for 2017, but never reaching that point. By the planned go-live date, the SAP S/4HANA system was not ready for production. In 2017 the company decided to stop its development. It audited what had already been built, determined the scope of required remediation, and began looking for a new partner capable of stabilizing the system and bringing the project to go-live.

When IBA Group came in, the SAP S/4HANA system was far from ready for production. Important functionality was still missing or unfinished, key integrations between modules and external systems had not been delivered to the required scope, and the architecture had technical inconsistencies. Much of the functionality had not been fully tested, with some requiring additional development. Several components had unclear implementation statuses and levels of preparedness. Under these conditions, continuing the project under the previous delivery logic was not viable, with the system requiring stabilization, closure of the critical gaps, and all functionality tested before production.

Taking on a system in that state made this a recovery project, and a recovery is a different category of difficulty from a standard SAP implementation:

On this project, four major difficulties came together, each one complicating the others:

1. The enterprise business processes were in the middle of general transformation.
2. A range of functional modules required organization into a single ERP.
3. The platform itself, SAP S/4HANA, was a relatively new product with few proven implementation patterns and large-scale reference cases.
4. No standard SAP localization was available for Georgia, so local legal, tax reporting, and regulatory requirements had to be addressed directly within the project.

Solution Overview

IBA Group took the project over and brought it to production. We began with a fast and deep diagnosis of the real state of the system: what actually works, what works only in part, and what does not work at all, rather than what the reports and documentation claimed. Based on the diagnosis, we determined:

• which components were ready for use and could stay unchanged;
• which functionality worked only partially and needed stabilization or further development;
• which solutions needed architectural redesign and which we should remove instead of repairing;
• which gaps blocked go-live and which we could move to later phases;
• which dependencies connected modules, integrations, and business processes;
• how each change could affect working components and the stability of the whole system.

On that basis, we grouped the issues, set priorities, and ran the project as a controlled recovery, with risk management made a priority. In a recovery case scenario, a change intended to correct one area can disrupt another that already functions, so every modification was assessed and controlled before its implementation. The IBA Group team worked in close coordination with the client’s team and with SAP as the vendor. Each development wave passed the client’s testing and formal acceptance before the next was released.

In parallel, the team restored the integrations the railway depended on: with the RS.GE state tax portal for electronic invoices and VAT, the billing systems, and the bank connections behind treasury. We also developed the missing reporting and analytics, from financial statements to management reports on freight and passenger transport, as well as configured the Georgian tax rules the system had to meet, such as the country’s tax declarations.

The first and main development wave, together with support for the initial production launch, took six months, after which the company was already able to use the SAP S/4HANA system in production. From there, we added functionality in iterations, covering period and year-end close, budgeting, and analytics, so the client saw results as early as possible while the platform was already live. The full planned scope was delivered within one year.

The final solution SAP S/4HANA centralized the railway’s financial, logistical, operational, and HR processes across its infrastructure, freight and passenger businesses in one integrated environment:

• Financial and management accounting (SAP FI, CO) — financial and management accounting, cost control and internal reporting;
• Asset accounting and treasury (SAP FI-AA, Treasury) — accounting for fixed assets and the management of cash and financial resources;
• Procurement and materials (SAP MM) — purchasing and materials supply across the railway;
• Maintenance and repairs (SAP PM, Enterprise Asset Management) — maintenance and repair of infrastructure and equipment;
• Sales and commercial processes (SAP SD) — commercial and sales operations for freight and passenger services;
• Budgeting and consolidation (SAP BPC) — budgeting and consolidated corporate reporting;
• HR and payroll (SAP HR, PY) — personnel management and payroll;
• Reporting and analytics (SAP BW) — management reporting and analytics on key figures.

Why a Recovery Project Needs a Different Kind of Partner

A SAP project recovery demands a different set of skills than a standard implementation. Such a project requires experts who not only know their own module well, but see the system as a whole: its architecture, the connections between modules, the integrations, and the potential consequences of changes implemented.

Here, project methodology matters most. In a recovery scenario, it works as a system that keeps a complex, unusual project under control and moving towards go-live. And recovering a stalled SAP project is a separate skill from building one from scratch, with a team having to step into a project already underway, taking on the landscape as it is, stabilising it, and bringing it to go-live.

IBA Group has been delivering large, complex SAP enterprise projects for major clients for years, including taking over projects from previous vendors. That experience gives us the delivery capability a recovery depends on: leading the project team, keeping governance and risk under control, and holding a complex architecture stable throughout.

Results

Georgian Railway now runs on a single corporate platform instead of the many separate systems it used before, with a shared data model and a real-time source of management information. Consequently, the enterprise acquired not merely an IT system, but a unified digital core for business management that ensures:

1. End-to-end transparency of financial and operational metrics,
2. A source of reliable and comparable management data for monitoring key performance indicators and analyzing costs,
3. Rapid management decision-making.

Bringing these processes onto one integrated platform gave the company consistent, reliable management data, a common accounting framework, and a stable foundation for future development. It gained greater operational transparency, standardized processes, adopted SAP best practices, reduced inventory and released working capital, accelerated data entry, and enabled faster, better-informed management decisions.

In the end, a project that had failed to go live originally was brought to a successful production launch by the IBA Group team, with the SAP S/4HANA system becoming among the early large-scale SAP S/4HANA implementations in the region.

About IBA Group

IBA Group has been an SAP partner since 1996 and holds more than 450 SAP certifications across its team. We deliver SAP S/4HANA implementation, migration, and recovery projects for clients across Europe, the US, and Central Asia, with decades of experience on large, complex corporate landscapes.

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