CW Innovation Awards: Taking the big bang approach to reporting

As a software and technology services global player, Bosch Global Software Technologies (BGSW) operates across multiple business units, serves diverse customer segments and manages a vast workforce. However, the company faced challenges due to its reliance on manual, transaction-driven reporting processes. These outdated methods often led to inefficiencies, errors and a lack of actionable insights.

Recognising the need for change, BGSW revamped its SAP structure across its different entities. The goal was to gain more granular insights into profitability at both the customer and business-unit levels to make it more efficient to allocate resources effectively or identify areas for improvement.

In addition to financial improvements, BGSW wanted to streamline its human resource (HR) processes, with a centralised, consistent set of employee data to replace fragmented data sources. This would enable master data-driven headcount reporting, allowing for more accurate and reliable analysis of staffing levels and trends.

BGSW opted for a “big bang” approach, rolling out the changes simultaneously across all entities, instead of the traditional phased implementation. The project was completed by 1 January 2025 – meeting the six-month schedule, and the budget of $115,200 with a spend of $99,000.

By revamping the SAP structure to generate detailed profit and loss reporting, BGSW can track profitability at the customer and business-unit levels. This granular insight allowed management to identify high-performing segments, address underperforming areas and make data-driven decisions to reduce expenses and improve cost efficiency.

A process that was changed included how all teams in the company were asked to follow a standard way of tracking projects and staying connected with customers throughout the project’s life cycle. Instead of managing projects and customers separately, every project is tied to a single customer from start to finish. This makes it easier to track the project’s progress, costs and billing, while maintaining a clear connection to the customer it serves. This created transparency in reporting the number of employees and calculating profits and losses.

The project also streamlined BGSW’s HR processes. By transitioning to master data-driven headcount reporting, the automated workforce tracking provided access to accurate, real-time headcount data. This allowed HR to focus on strategic initiatives like workforce planning and talent development, rather than manual reporting.

The project also involved mapping each associate to their respective “customer” levels in the Employee Master Data, which clarified the organisational structure and simplified HR processes such as onboarding, performance management and reporting.

To improve operational efficiency, BGSW updated over eight internal tools used across the company for day-to-day activities, such as HR tools and databases. By incorporating “customer”-level specific process flows, this streamlined operations and improved productivity in those areas, which translated into time savings and improved efficiency.

By implementing the project across all the BGSW entities, it ensured that all entities had consistency in data and reporting across the organisation, facilitating better management and consolidated reporting.

The project presented significant challenges, requiring extensive planning and coordination due to its complexity. Key tasks involved modifying the SAP system, creating a separate project for each customer, linking employees to specific customers, updating tools to match new processes and managing a big team.

As a predominantly in-house effort, the project involved more than 125 internal associates, including the company’s SAP and integration experts. It also demanded cross-functional collaboration across different departments and entities, with the project impacting multiple areas of the organisation.

Finally, taking a “big bang” approach across all the BGSW entities helped to minimise disruptions and allowed a faster organisation-wide transition.

In essence, the company revamped both its processes and systems to improve financial transparency, project tracking and HR processes. By prioritising internal systems and shifting from organisational to customer-centric transactions, the project focused on optimising and adapting existing technology rather than relying on entirely new systems from external suppliers.