Rails to Success: A Case Study on Canadian Pacific Railway's Journey through Process Improvement
Incorporated in 1881, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) fulfilled its mandate of constructing a transcontinental railway by 1885, connecting Eastern Canada to British Columbia. As of today, re-branded as CP, they boasts over 22,500 km of track in Canada and USA with over $7.71 billion in revenues. They heavily use large SAP footprint to run their business and aimed to streamline their SAP implementation across multiple projects being executed in parallel encompassed new implementation, upgrade, migration, business process improvement and change management. The goal was to automate manual processes, and enhance efficiencies and visibility to support informed decision-making to PMO.
CLIENT
Canadian Pacific Railway
CATEGORY
SAP Process Improvement
DATE
Objectives
Given its intricate business model heavily reliant on an extensive SAP infrastructure, Canadian Pacific Railway sought to implement robust process improvement initiatives across its concurrent SAP projects. These endeavors, characterized by substantial project budgets, often encountered delays, leading to significant losses in time, resources, and productivity.
Challenges
To address critical gaps in its SAP implementation plan and roadmaps, Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) recognized the imperative of implementing enhanced test strategies within its ongoing project activities. These improvements aimed to bolster system reliability while concurrently mitigating overall project costs. Key areas of focus included refining test procedures and enhancing the SAP implementation plan, all geared towards achieving heightened system reliability and cost efficiency.
Solutions
We spearheaded the re-engineering of enhanced test methodologies, transparent SAP implementation plans, and rigorous testing procedures aimed at mitigating critical risks and closing operational gaps. This was achieved through close collaboration with stakeholders and the extensive SAP team, ensuring alignment with organizational objectives and driving tangible improvements across the board.
Background
Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) operates a vast SAP system landscape essential for managing its intricate business model efficiently. They run multiple SAP landscapes for ERP, CRM, SRM, PI, BI, Portal, BPC, Solution Manager, Mobile, MDM, and many more.Given the complexity of business operations, continual enhancement and improvement of SAP methodologies and rigorous validation of testing becomes imperative to run robust SAP landscape. CPR undertakes multiple large-scale SAP projects concurrently demanding involvement of diverse SAP teams, consulting partners, and service providers, each playing a specialized role in the overall implementation process. However, managing such extensive projects poses inherent challenges, including the coordination of numerous SAP tasks and decisions across various teams, often resulting in frequent rework of tasks and the occurrence of repetitive errors resulting in a significant risk to project deadlines and lead to costly delays in delivering project deliverables, underscoring the importance of meticulous planning and execution in CPR's SAP initiatives.
Our Involvement
Our key involvements through the upgrade project included
- Identify critical gaps in current SAP methodologies and align them with SAP best practices.
- Recommend changes to current methods with 1:1 discussion with various teams, sharing examples or repeating errors and help identify and rectify potential issues early in the implementation process, leading to a more stable and reliable SAP system.
- Thorough planning and validation minimize unexpected disruptions, reducing downtime and ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
- Implement project management and governance methodologies and processes for project team.
- Work with various SAP project leaders and stake holders to Identify and address issues before they escalate into larger problems to help control project costs by minimizing the need for costly rework and troubleshooting.
- Form project working group and status update model during the execution of the project
- Help designing implementation plans, project roadmaps, architecture diagrams, and effort estimates as needed for project deliverables.
- Improve user experience with well-planned and validated SAP project result in systems that align more closely with user needs and expectations.
- Increased Stakeholder Confidence with transparent planning and validation processes by demonstrating a proactive approach to project management and risk mitigation.
- Help preparing comprehensive procedure documentation template, defect tracking plans, robust testing and approval mechanism and contribute to over all success of SAP projects.
OUR CONSULTING BENEFITS
SAP certified consulting team
Our team is SAP certified with years of industry experience equipped with quality knowledge on latest SAP innovations and business processes followed by other organizations in same business
Boutique consulting model
We believe in a lean, specialized, and agile team structure packaged in a boutique consulting model to provide tailored and attentive support critical for the project.
Cost efficient upgrade strategies
With a focused team model, we were able to offer the most optimal and cost-efficient strategies to manage entire upgrade project from time, money, and effort stand point.
“Our company is driven by our passion and a great vision that is backed by our years of experience.”
