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Productive Partnership in Challenging Times at Havas Voyages in France for SAP R/3 Solution and Supporting Infrastructures

Havas Voyages represents Thomas Cook AG in France as the leading leisure travel retailer with 420 outlets and turnover close to € 1 billion.

Before the end of 2003, the brand of Thomas Cook will be rolled out in France across Havas Voyages’ network.

The company had a 3-year window to replace all core business systems and invited Capgemini to help specify, design and deploy solutions to meet current and known future demands. SAP R/3 was the preferred platform for Havas Voyages with Capgemini’s alliance partnership with SAP offering added value.

A professional, committed and collaborative team delivered accelerated results to time and quality. This was despite an intervening global event that numbed the world, threatened the industry and directly impacted the project.

Client Profile

Thomas Cook AG, one of the world’s largest leisure groups, offers more than 14 million customers ‘The Whole World of Travel’.

European operations, notably in Germany, the UK, France and Benelux, account for the majority of group turnover exceeding € 8 billion. Headquartered in Germany, Thomas Cook has a workforce of 28,000 and is also present in Egypt, India and Canada.

Working right across the travel value chain: airlines operating a fleet of 86 aircraft; 73,000 managed hotel beds; about 30 tour operators; 3,600 agencies, Thomas Cook provides customers with the right product in all market segments. Havas Voyages represents Thomas Cook in France.

Business Issues

Following a series of mergers and acquisitions, Thomas Cook AG emerged as a powerful brand to carry the group forward in the new millennium. An element of the merger activity affected Havas Voyages directly.

Havas Voyages had three years to continue using legacy systems from a former parent, and needed to specify, design and build new infrastructures, systems and applications going forward.

Management at Havas Voyages conducted an internal study with help from Capgemini to examine the current landscape and derive base principles for a future state design. Key findings revealed that:

• systems were not supplying an appropriate level of detail to act as a differentiator
• management information was unreliable and the time taken to generate reports did not facilitate effective decision making
• general ledger systems were complex and not fully understood
• there was no mechanism to cascade information easily throughout the organisation.

Partnership with a professional service organisation best served requirements and Capgemini was invited to help devise effective strategies and formulate plans. The partner demonstrated good understanding of the business challenges faced by Havas Voyages and credentials to address them via relevant technology.

Havas Voyages therefore asked Capgemini to help develop a roadmap, make recommendations on suitable platforms and technology, and leverage best practices to design, develop and deliver integrated results. It was important that Havas Voyages had an effective strategy for ongoing management of resultant systems.

Solution

Capgemini leveraged its strengths by mobilising a collaborative project team to progress requirements. Plans were enacted to develop the strategy, evaluate packages and select one best suited to Havas Voyages.

The project scope was a complete system makeover (front- and back-office) supported by comprehensive Infrastructure Management services. Clear milestones were agreed with Havas Voyages for the project to be managed via phases. The collaborative team comprised key stakeholders in Havas Voyages, Thomas Cook Corporate IT and various other third party suppliers for specific phases.

SAP R/3 was selected as the preferred ERP solution – it was also the system in use at Thomas Cook. Once the package had been selected, the next phase started developing the project charter, and as a parallel activity, work commenced on supporting architecture and underlying infrastructures.

Plans included the start of the systems integration within a year of project launch. Just days before the board made its final decision to launch the development phase, a major, external event occurred. The devastating terrorist attacks in the US that destroyed lives and property not only numbed the world, they threatened the leisure industry, and directly impacted the project at Havas Voyages. The events forced a complete re-think of the (sound) strategy that Havas Voyages had committed to.

It was imperative that the project was progressed – the window for replacement of current systems was now two years with very little margin for error or slippage. Swift decisions were taken to redefine the project steer, budget and deliverables. Havas Voyages elected to reduce the project scope to the business-critical back-office systems.

Management challenged Capgemini to adopt a strategy based on ‘design-to-cost’ principles and revise the project scope. Demonstrating adaptability, Capgemini came up with an approach that would still deliver the re-scoped project at the same quality, but at greater speed and lower cost. The project would be delivered with two key elements at its heart:

• leveraging Capgemini’s ADC (Accelerated Delivery Center) in Paris to remotely develop SAP modules
• deploying a toolkit (Startkit) to automatically create templates and checklists to accelerate the project lifecycle, and also, by providing standard process flows (or similar samples), help define the blueprint.

The innovative idea appealed to management at Havas Voyages who urged Capgemini to steer forward. Within three months, a comprehensive blueprint of the revised solution was delivered, and following sign-off by Havas Voyages, the project moved full steam ahead to development.

The joint project team took up residence in the ADC to start developing applications. The ADC offered a ‘plug and play’ environment, with required infrastructure, software, hardware and support systems in place.

The high transaction-based business volumes at Havas Voyages added a level of complexity. It was also important that corporate standards for Thomas Cook were always kept in sharp view. These elements demanded strong project management and effective monitoring.

The toolkit was an extension of best practices that Capgemini deploys on other projects. Adapted specifically for the project, it created in hours (instead of the standard week) all the templates to be deployed at Havas Voyages.

By automating 80% of routine items on standard tasks, the toolkit shaved about 20% of the elapsed project time. It also allowed the team to focus on the 20% of work in a typical project that demands closer inspection and attention to detail. In essence, there was a virtuous circle of activity (task - priority – resolution) yielding increased productivity in each cycle.

The combination of the ADC and toolkit ensured that Capgemini kept to its promise of increased productivity without impacting quality or agreed delivery date of resultant systems. Including a 4-month testing and training cycle, the entire development and deployment phases lasted just over 10 months. This ensured that resulting systems were delivered – on time, to budget and above expectations of management at Havas Voyages.

Benefits

Havas Voyages management was delighted with the project, dubbed Océane Back Office, upon successful go-live. At the time, Chief Information Officers for Thomas Cook (Corporate) and Thomas Cook (Western/ Eastern Europe) released a joint congratulatory message to all team members. An extract of the message is shown below:

“Last weekend Havas Voyages took a major step on the road of it’s new IT architecture. Thanks to your continuous effort and commitment Océane Back Office went life successfully.

This outstanding achievement is the result of a close and intense collaboration between the different partners Havas Voyages, Thomas Cook Corporate IT Services, Capgemini as main SAP contractor and various other suppliers in the realm of legacy system developments and infrastructure rollout.

A program of this magnitude could only achieve thanks to tight and professional management on all levels and to the commitment of all teams. Therefore we want to congratulate you all.

We strongly believe that you gave an exceptional example of how a complex international project under strong time pressure should be managed.

Let’s make IT always happen in this way.”

Part of the success of the project was a very complete and comprehensive blueprint. This allowed development tasks to be correctly identified and accurately prioritised. The result facilitates:

• integrated back-office system landscape supported by modern architecture and infrastructures
• enhanced management information and control
• effective management decisions via seamless analysis and reporting from General Ledger.