Toyota Finance Australia upgrades its ERP

Toyota Finance Australia has completed its shift from a 16-year-old SAP ECC environment to one that runs on S/4HANA cloud public edition.

Head of financial reporting and operations Moulik Doshi told the SAP NOW AI Tour in Sydney that the migration took 13 months, and went live in early August.

The migration project was codenamed 'Kizuna', a Japanese character that symbolises ties between people. Doshi said the project was about like-minded people from across Toyota Finance Australia "coming together" and "focusing on a common goal, which was for us to go live."

All SAP customers are dealing with the looming end-of-life of ECC 6.0 at the end of 2027, with S/4HANA the logical upgrade target.

“We were on a really old version [of SAP], a 16-17 years old version,” Doshi said.

Toyota Finance Australia undertook a sizable planning exercise before going through the migration.

Doshi said the organisation prioritised understanding the complexity embedded within its older SAP environment, such as other systems it was connected to.

This enabled it to verify that its target endstate, on the cloud public edition of S/4HANA, was “doable”.

The organisation also prioritised user experience and getting staff up to speed with the new system.

One of the major changes in moving to the cloud public edition was that it supports a lower level of customisation compared to ECC.

This broadly comes under a strategy SAP calls ‘clean core’, which is intended, among other things, to enable customers to accept future cloud-based upgrades and get access to new features, rather than remain anchored to an older version of the software.

Doshi said that another change is that users can do more themselves in the new platform, such as creating their own views of data through dashboards and reports.

He said that previously, this would have been handled by specialist data teams or personnel, although he noted that not every organisation has these resources.

“Now you've got something which the platform can actually do for you,” he said.

He added that Toyota Finance Australia is still learning “how best we [can] leverage this modern platform.”

“I think we'll be on that journey for a while.”