When the Hovis divestment was announced Premier Foods had a short timescale in which to ensure that all the correct SAP security authorisations would be in place from day one, for both companies. Premier Foods had to carve out the Hovis brand and migrate Hovis users, roles and data access from the Premier Foods SAP environment onto a separate system. After the divestment, Premier Foods had a Technical Service Agreement (TSA) with the new owners, to provide on-going support while the systems were migrated over.
Khalid Khan, Premier Foods’ SAP Application Security Lead, explains: “We had a challenging time frame to get security systems in place once the divestment was announced, and this was on top of our existing workload. Due to the additional burden on my authorisations team we had to get in extra resource, and that’s why we turned to Turnkey Consulting. We have worked with them before and trust them to get the job done.”
On 26 April 2014 Hovis moved over to the independent company. Because they did not have their own SAP system already setup, in the transition period they continued to operate on the Premier Foods’ SAP system.
It was a legal requirement that Hovis’ data had to be separated from the rest of the Premier Foods brands. Turnkey Consulting supported this by ensuring that access to Premier Foods’ master data and processes was removed from users of the host SAP system.
“We had two groups of people on our system, one of which was Premier Group looking at Premier data and the other was Hovis people looking at Hovis data. We had to make sure that the correct authorisations were in place to ensure that the new owners could only see their data and not the whole of Premier’s data,” says Khan.
Turnkey then helped Premier Foods separate out the Hovis users and migrate them onto their new system.
Turnkey Consulting offered Premier Foods a blended delivery model which enabled a senior Turnkey consultant to focus on the complex tasks while a Turnkey trained graduate took care of the administrative activities. This allowed Turnkey to provide a high level of resource at a cost effective price. This arrangement also benefited Turnkey by developing their junior staff.
“This was a resource fulfilment collaboration we undertook with Turnkey and they responded quickly. We allowed the graduate to get her hands on our systems, under the supervision of Turnkey’s experienced consultant. There was a lot of leg work that needed doing so the graduate did that while the senior consultant focused on the more complicated stuff,” explains Khan.