PwC secures efficient data migration with Movu Robotics

Movu Robotics is on a mission to automate all warehouses around the world to increase efficiency and bring them to a next level. Part of stow Group, that delivers a diverse range of racking and shelving solutions for warehouses, the Belgian fledgling company has grown over the past four years to a workforce of more than 400 people. It's now present in its home country, as well as France, Germany and the US. Movu Robotics is looking to capitalise on its first-mover advantage and has an ambitious expansion strategy, focused especially on the American market. It needed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that could support its ambitions along with a method to migrate existing data to that new system efficiently and with minimal errors.

Movu Robotics had inherited a legacy SAP system from stow Group, but it wasn’t up to the task at hand. For the new system, explains Branco Moens, Application Manager, Movu Robotics, “SAP S/4HANA was a clear choice. As was PwC for the migration. With a greenfield S/4HANA implementation, we’re able to standardise, streamline and optimise processes based on the needs of Movu Robotics. With streamlined processes, we’re much more efficient and can secure the quality of our work.”

The system is also in line with the evolving regulatory context in which Movu Robotics operates. “With S/4HANA and SAP DRC, we’re able to comply with legal requirements that impact us in all countries in which we operate,” he adds.

PwC convinced Movu Robotics that we’re the ideal SAP partner to support it with a S4H structured implementation approach. In the preliminary discussions on how PwC saw the architecture and the team’s vision and approach as to how to tackle the challenge convinced us. The PwC team could see and explain exactly how everything would fit together in the future scenario making maximal use of SAP Best Practices and following SAP's vision of the future. On top of that we're well versed in data migration.

Migrating data from the existing system to S/4HANA, we used a prebuilt data migration cockpit. David Van Hauthem, Group Master Data Governance with stow Group, explains: “The data management cockpit enabled us to identify errors at an early stage and formulate rules for migration and together with PwC, we gradually adapted these rules to secure a smooth migration. That the tool was prebuilt allowed the PwC team to undertake the entire process relatively quickly. Even though the new system required new rules compared to our previous platform, the tool was able to account for different values and translate data from the old to the new context with minimal manual labour. This meant we could accelerate the process while being confident that errors were minimal, as the iterations allowed us to easily identify and correct them.” 

The move to the new ERP system involved 45 SAP objects, spanning eight SAP process streams. There were no failed or omitted objects and zero defects, and just one customised load programme. The migration took place over one weekend, ensuring that Movu Robotics faced no business disruption in any country.

With S/4HANA and PwC’s support, Movu Robotics has now all the necessary tools that will support their business and allow them to realise its ambitions and live up to its motto of “no warehouse left behind”.