Norton Rose Fulbright has gone live on SAP HANA with Fulcrum Global Technologies, after a project that signed in March 2016 and will ultimately consolidate five profit centres across the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa.
While South Africa is not scoped in the initial roll out, the remaining sites on 8 October swapped out Aderant and Elite for one instance of SAP in the private cloud, using Fulcrum’s time entry, CRM, matter budgeting, finance and billing and analytics modules. Time entry and CRM are software-as-a-service products.
The go live follows a planning stage that began in around April 2016, with implementation beginning in late August of that year. Just over a year later, NRF has cut over to SAP on time and to budget, although the 3,700-lawyer firm is still within the hypercare period and understandably nervous about counting its chickens before they have hatched.
Just under a month after go-live, the transition is reported by insiders to have been very smooth or “quiet” so far. Silence really is golden in this case, although NRF was experiencing its first month end billing as we went to press.
While it is after go live that the change management really kicks in, speaking to the Orange Rag, Ahmed Shaaban, founder and managing director of Fulcrum GT said: “Partners are now feeling the change but as part of our process we implement change management and training from day one. All the processes are validated, and all the key stakeholders get involved and we run through trials. We pretty much go through dry runs and we did that in May and June to ensure data readiness. We worked very closely with people to make sure we bring together the people and processes.”
As part of its Project 2020 transformation, NRF, which first began looking at SAP in 2014, has established a global shared services back office in Manila, which was announced in May 2016 and houses around 5% of the global business services workforce including much of its IT support function.
In terms of SAP/Fulcrum, Shabaan said: “Everything has gone to time and budget and the processes are in place to provide a truly enterprise solution that spans all countries. What is great about the Fulcrum solution is that it means the localisation of globalisation. It runs with your tax laws in your currency, so the UK has VAT, Australia has different trust rules and although it’s a global platform it operates on a local level.”
Rob Otty (pictured), managing partner, business integration said: “We can confirm that we cutover to our SAP GPMS in early October. We are currently in the hypercare period of the rollout of the system and as such it is too early to comment on how the system is performing. We will comment once the hypercare period has completed.”
We’ll bring you more soon.