REQUEST FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

“SAP PRACTICE ASSESSMENT”

AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK

Avenue Joseph Anoma, 01 B.P. 1387, Abidjan, CÔTE D’IVOIRE

Corporate IT Services Department (CHIS)

E-mail : IT_Recruitment@AFDB.ORG

Telephone : (+225) 20 26 22 61/ (+225) 20 26 25 83

 

 

 

  1. The African Development Bank (AfDB) hereby invites Consulting Firms to indicate their interest in the following Assignment : SAP PRACTICE ASSESSMENT.
  1. CONTEXT ON THE CURRENT & UPCOMING SAP PROJECTS :

SAP plays a very central role for AfDB, as it is the platform that automates most core functions of the Bank.

The main modules and core functions covered by SAP are listed below :

  • FI (finance), including the GL (General Ledger) and BCM (Bank Communication Management) ;
  • FM-BCS (budgeting) ;
  • HCM + SuccessFactors (HR) ;
  • Concur (Travel) ;
  • MM / SRM (institutional procurement) ;
  • PS (project management / accounting, loan origination and project procurement) ;
  • CML (loans) ;
  • TFMS (trust funds) ;
  • BW / BO (Datawarehouse & reporting) ;
  • PPM (portfolio management).

The Bank engaged in an SAP transformation journey thanks to Program WAKANDA 1(Phase I) which helped to convert technically the former ECC6 to S/4hana and brought some enhanced functional capabilities on Budget and Security. A Phase II of that SAP Transformation program was requested to meet the Quality Assurance Implementation Plan Action Area 7 requirement; This is addressing the need for an integrated platform to cover the full value chain of the Bank’s operations (from pipeline to the project execution including access through a portal to the customers and partners). This phase II implies some major release upgrades in the SAP landscape as a pre-requisite.

On top of that and prior to the Program WAKANDA Phase II, the Bank acquired the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) which brings together intelligent enterprise applications with data management, analytics, integration, and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments. This SAP BTP includes hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.

The Bank is also engaged in other initiatives that requires changes in SAP such as the IBOR Transition.

New initiatives are to be added to this list such as re placing the procurement system with Implementing a Financial tool to handle the financial results through an SAP Group Reporting tool, IFRS9 migration to SAP.

SAP Transformation and Business Process Reengineering projects.

On top of that, the HR functions require some revamping, and the financial systems should also benefit of an improved internal ability to better use SAP S/4Hana; the procurement requires CHIS to consider a migration from SRM to SAP Ariba, while Finance also request CHIS to conduct a feasibility study of migrating the IFRS9 in SAP.

 

  1. SAP PRACTICE CHALLENGES :

The IT Strategy for 2017-2020 formulated three main challenges in the practice of SAP at AfDB :

  1. First challenge: Lack of innovation hindering achievement of business priorities – The latest functional improvements from SAP have not been implemented in the current platform, resulting in important functional limitations are faced by the business day-to-day. This includes poor usability ;
  2. Second challenge: High customization, resulting in limited agility – Many non-documented customizations exist, increasing time-to-market to develop new functionalities and making the platform complex and costly to maintain ;
  3. Third challenge: non-performing operating model – The mix of internal SAP resources is not optimal, the support received from SAP is low and there is very limited user training on SAP.

Program WAKANDA addressed partially the first two challenges. Although the transformation brought some answers it does not cover all (SAP impacted) functions at the Bank. The conversion to the latest version of SAP (S/4Hana) brought some capabilities but as indicated in the third challenge, there is still limitations in the Bank ability to operate and bring the expected value from the SAP investments. This needs to be addressed by CHIS.

 

  1. The African Development Bank Group (AfDB) is seeking the services of a Consulting to help in having some resolution plan and step-up from a limited struggling IT support/ Service to a Business / Value Partner.

The terms of reference attached as Annex 1 provide more details about the scope of work and the expected outcomes.

 

  1. The Corporate IT Services Department (CHIS) invites eligible firms to indicate their interest in providing these services. Interested eligible Consulting Firms or associations of Consulting Firms shall provide information on their qualifications and experience demonstrating their ability to provide the services (documentation, references for similar services, experience in comparable Assignments, availability of qualified staff, etc.) ;
  2. The eligibility criteria, the establishment of a short list and the selection procedure shall be in conformity with the Bank’s Procurement Policy and Procedures for Recruitment of Corporate Consultants. Please, note that interest expressed by a Consulting Firm does not imply any obligation on the part of the Bank to include it in the shortlist ;
  3. The assignment duration will be based on the Consultant’s assessment of the requirements set out above but is not expected to exceed three (03) calendar months from the date of signing of the contract ;
  1. The work will be carried in the Bank’s headquarters in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire or from remote locations when required. Considering the current COVID-19 situation, the assignment might have to be organized remotely ;
  1. Interested Consulting Firms may obtain further information at the address below during office hours 09:00 to 17:00 hours, Abidjan Local Time ;
  1. Expressions of interest must be sent by email at the address below before Wednesday 24 November 2021 at 16:00 hours, Abidjan Local Time, and mention “SAP PRACTICE ASSESSMENT”.

For the attention of: IT Recruitment Team African Development Bank

Corporate IT Services Department (CHIS) Avenue Joseph Anoma, 01 B.P. 1387, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

Tel: (+225) 27 20 26 22 61

Email : IT_Recruitment@AFDB.ORG

ANNEX 1: TERMS OF REFERENCE

SAP PRACTICE ASSESSMENT

 

BACKGROUND :

SAP plays a very central role for AfDB, as it is the platform that automates most core functions of the Bank.

The main modules and core functions covered by SAP are listed below:

  • FI (finance), including the GL (General Ledger) and BCM (Bank Communication Management) ;
  • FM-BCS (budgeting) ;
  • HCM + SuccessFactors (HR) ;
  • Concur (Travel) ;
  • MM / SRM (institutional procurement) ;
  • PS (project management / accounting, loan origination and project procurement) ;
  • CML (loans) ;
  • TFMS (trust funds) ;
  • BW / BO (Datawarehouse & reporting) ;
  • PPM (portfolio management).

The Bank engaged in an SAP transformation journey thanks to Program WAKANDA (Phase I) which helped to convert technically the former ECC6 to S/4hana and brought some enhanced functional capabilities on Budget and Security. A Phase II of that SAP Transformation program was requested to meet the Quality Assurance Implementation Plan Action Area 7 requirement; This is addressing the need for an integrated platform to cover the full value chain of the Bank’s operations (from pipeline to the project execution including access through a portal to the customers and partners). This phase II implies some major release upgrades in the SAP landscape as a pre-requisite.

On top of that and prior to the Program WAKANDA Phase II, the Bank acquired the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) which brings together intelligent enterprise applications with data management, analytics, integration, and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments. This SAP BTP includes hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.

The Bank is also engaged in other initiatives that requires changes in SAP such as the IBOR Transition.

New initiatives are to be added to this list such as replacing the procurement system with Implementing a Financial tool to handle the Financial results through an SAP Group Reporting tool, IFRS9 “expected credit loss” migration to SAP.

On top of that, the HR functions require some revamping, and the Financial systems should also benefit of an improved internal ability to better use SAP S/4Hana; the procurement requires CHIS to consider a migration from SRM to SAP Ariba, while Finance also request CHIS to conduct a feasibility study of migrating the IFRS9 in SAP.

The IT Strategy for 2017-2020 formulated three main challenges in the practice of SAP at AfDB :

  • First challenge : Lack of innovation hindering achievement of business priorities – The latest functional improvements from SAP have not been implemented in the current platform, resulting in important functional limitations are faced by the business day-to-day. This includes poor usability ;
  • Second challenge: High customization, resulting in limited agility – Many non-documented customizations exist, increasing time-to-market to develop new functionalities and making the platform complex and costly to maintain ;
  • Third challenge: Non-performing operating model – The mix of internal SAP resources is not optimal, the support received from SAP is low and there is very limited user training on SAP.

Program WAKANDA addressed partially the first two challenges. Although the transformation brought some answers it does not cover all (SAP impacted) functions at the Bank. The conversion to the latest version of SAP (S/4Hana) brought some capabilities but as indicated in the third challenge, there is still limitations in the Bank ability to operate and bring the expected value from the SAP investments. This needs to be addressed by CHIS.

Figure 1: AfDB’s SAP staff

The situation as presented in 2017 in the Digital Strategy report already alerted on the insufficiency of the SAP support capacity.

In 2021, the situation is worse. Half of the staff presented in figure 1, retired, or moved to other departments. The rest of the staff has no clear definition of the roles and responsibilities among functional expertise, configuration and developers, maintenance or projects activities. This results into experts multi-tasking on configuration, development, and maintenance in parallel, with no quality time, expertise, and support to do proper business engagement and training.

External individual consultants complete the internal workforce but are managed in “silo” mode by internal staff who cannot yet be considered as S/4Hana experts.

There is an insufficient level of SAP training for subject matters experts. The number of trainings dropped by 69% between 2014 and 2015, and no official SAP business training was conducted until

Program WAKANDA. SAP e-learning hub was available only for 1 year during Program WAKANDA (2019) and since then is not part of the learning offer.

These challenges imply some major risks for the Bank :

  • Risk of saturation for our current SAP workforce engaged in several strategic initiatives ;
  • Risk on the operations related to risk 1 but also to our limited capacity to operate SAP ;
  • Risk of not meeting the expected return on investments from these past years and upcoming SAP projects.

 

  1. OBJECTIVE OF THE ASSIGNMENT :

We therefore require services of a consultant to help the Bank having some resolution plan and step-up from a limited struggling IT support/ Service to a Business/ Value Partner.

Figure 2: SAP Practice and Value Contribution (Gartner 2020).

 

  1. SCOPE OF THE SERVICES :

The consulting service are restricted to the SAP landscape activities.

 

  1. DELIVERABLES :

The consulting service is requested to provide an analysis with at least the following outcomes :

Design a target model of the Bank SAP Center of Excellence (COE) from well-established frameworks. This should ideally incorporate the following items :

  •  The SAP IT direction setting (vision, mission, cost, reliability, functionality) ;
  •  Overview of all needed SAP-related capabilities in the AfDB specific context ;
  •  Define roles (business, technical) ;
  •  Define a RACI matrix for the SAP landscape ;
  •  Estimate the right sizing FTE allocation ;
  •  Provide an SAP IT organizational chart in line with the Bank’s organization ;
  • Provide a transformation plan including ;
  • Milestones to reach the targeted COE with a transformed SAP operating model ;
  • A functional “upgrade” roadmap of the SAP landscape.

 

  1. DURATION & TIMELINE :

The assignment duration will be based on the Consultant’s assessment of the requirements set out above but is not expected to exceed three (03) calendar months from the date of signing of the contract.

 

  1. LOCATION :

The work will be carried in the Bank’s headquarters in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire or from remote locations when required. Considering the current COVID-19 situation, the assignment might have to be organized remotely.

 

  1. REPORTING :

The consultant will provide daily/weekly update to the Stream lead from CHIS and designated staff about progress made and any issues that may arise during the assignment and that need quick resolution.

 

  1. SELECTION CRITERIA AND CONSULTANT’S PROFILE

 The consultant should demonstrate experiences and competencies in SAP practice and systems assessment.

Competencies must include :

  • Experience in formulating SAP S/4Hana recommendations on organizational, functional, and technical aspects ;
  • Experience with established frameworks allowing to assess an SAP practice and design an SAP Center of Excellence ;
  • Experience in SAP components in use at the Bank (especially FI/CO, FM BCS, CML, HCM, PS, PPM, SuccessFactors, Concur, GRC, BPC) ;
  • Ability to translate complex IT implications and recommendations into consumable business language aiding decision-making by senior management stakeholders with little or no SAP/technical understanding.

 The consultant must provide proof of successful delivery of the services listed in this Terms of reference in at least one (01) large institution, preferably a public or international one with a scope of activities like the Bank.

 The consultant(s) proposed should have the following skills :

  • Hands on experience in SAP S/4Hana ;
  • Relevant experience in conducting similar assignments ;
  • Good presentation skills ;
  • Good English/French proficiency, although English being mandatory.

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