Expert Support for S/4HANA Implementation

ACBaltica joined a client-led team to help the customer, an international IT service provider with 20 legal entities in 10+ countries and 2,5k+ employees, track time and profitability across the company. ACBaltica's experts contributed solution architecture, reporting and controlling design, CRM and workforce integrations, Basis and infrastructure, and banking integration. 

Customer

The customer is a large international IT company with 20 legal entities across 15 countries and more than 2,500 employees.

As a professional services company, the customer doesn't sell a product – it sells the expertise of its people: their knowledge and experience building custom solutions for clients. That expertise is delivered and billed by the hour, which is why employees themselves are the primary accounting objects in the ERP system – the unit against which everything else is measured.

With a future IPO in mind, the company needed a system that auditors and investors alike could trust. That's what led the company to SAP S/4HANA on-prem.

Challenge

Building SAP around a company with resource-related billing surfaced a few problems most implementations don't have to solve:

• A single, group-wide go-live. In the company, the cost and revenue tied to the same piece of work often fall under different legal entities – an engineer might be employed and costed in one entity, while the revenue from their work is billed through another. Leaving any single entity out of scope would break that link. All 20 entities had to switch over on the same day, or the picture wouldn't add up.

• People as the core unit of accounting. With over 2,500 employees acting as cost and revenue objects, the system needed to track time, cost, and revenue at the individual level – then roll all of it up across project positions, departments, regions, and legal entities – all without exposing anyone's personal data, since the bulk of each person's cost is their salary.

• Tracking cost by person without exposing personal data. Since most of an employee's cost is their salary, tracking cost and revenue at the individual level risked turning the system into a de facto salary register – a serious problem under GDPR. The solution had to allow the system to calculate employee-related costs without anyone being able to connect that employee to a real name.

• A landscape of custom, in-house systems. The customer had built much of its own software over the years, including its staffing and time-tracking tools and employee management system. All of it needed to feed cleanly into SAP.

• High stakes for incentive compensation. Profitability numbers calculated in SAP directly decide bonus and commission payouts for around 300 people, spread across 27 different methodologies. Getting the underlying data right was truly essential.

Solution

In 2024, the customer assembled a mixed team of SAP specialists to implement S/4HANA – staff augmentation specialists, freelancers, and in-house employees, all managed internally. ACBaltica joined that team to cover solution architecture and Basis/infrastructure design. The implementation kicked off in mid-2024 and went live as a big bang across all 20 entities in January 2026.

The goal was a system that could evaluate the business's efficiency promptly and reliably, slicing data across dozens of dimensions – position, employee, entity, department, country, and more. At its core, that meant standard SAP Overhead Cost Controlling and Profitability Analysis (margin analysis). Partway through the project, the team found that S/4HANA's built-in analytics weren't detailed enough for the customer's needs, so they added SAP BW and BOBJ modules.

Here's what ACBaltica's specialists contributed:

End-to-end Profitability Accounting solution

• Design and implementation of the end-to-end solution behind the customer's Profitability Accounting (Contribution Margin Analysis) – not just the architecture, but the full build. That included:

• Solutions built on SAP Project System (PS), the backbone for tracking cost and revenue at the project and project-position level.

• FI and CO configuration that captures cost in the specific dimensions and analytics the customer needed – the core calculation logic runs entirely on standard SAP Controlling configuration. No custom code involved.

• Design and setup of the period-end closing process across nearly all modules and parts of the system, ensuring data is consistent and ready for reporting at the end of every period.

• The Profitability reporting layer itself: hundreds of P&L views, broken down by client, project, project position, employee, department, region, and legal entity – giving the customer a consistent way to measure performance anywhere in the business, across 56 distinct analytical dimensions.

• Bonus and commission calculation solution based on 27 distinct methodologies for roughly 300 people on incentive plans.

CRM and workforce integrations

• ACBaltica's solution architect defined the integration requirements for the customer's home-grown systems (time tracking, the pre-hire/candidate system, payroll) and for Salesforce CRM; colleagues then built the integrations to those specs. Here's how it came together:

• Salesforce integration covers both the client/account side and the project/project-position side. As new projects and staffing assignments appear in Salesforce, they are automatically synced with SAP.

• A connection to the customer's in-house employee management system brings new hires into SAP automatically, as soon as they convert from prospective to actual employees.

• An integration with the customer's in-house staffing system assigns each employee to the right project, ensuring accurate time tracking.

• Time tracking flows by employee and by project position, distinguishing billable client work from bench time and internal work.

Every integration follows SAP standards, with minimal custom code.

Basis and infrastructure

• Solution landscape design – database and OS installation, third-party system integration, backup, and more.

• Ongoing SAP Basis support.

• Hardware consulting.

• Integration between S/4HANA on-premise and SAP BTP, including SAP Document and Reporting Compliance and Cloud ALM solution.

Banking integration

Integration with the customer’s bank covering automated payment processing and bank statement uploads, including direct coordination with the bank's own IT team.

Project team

ACBaltica:

• Solution Architect / Reporting and Controlling Lead

• SAP Basis and Infrastructure senior consultant

• Senior SAP consultant with expertise in banking integrations

The customer:

A cross-functional, internally managed implementation team combining in-house employees, freelancers, and staff-augmentation specialists from multiple SAP-partner companies

Results and benefits

• Multi-dimensional visibility into profitability. The customer can now analyze performance by client, project, project position, person, department, region, or legal entity. The system generates P&Ls across 50+ distinct analytical dimensions, supporting faster decisions at every level of the business.

• Reliable, auditable incentive payouts. A few hundred managers receive bonus and commission payments calculated consistently against 20+ distinct methodologies, backed by the same data used for financial reporting.

• A stable, well-supported technical foundation. Solution landscape design, ongoing Basis support, and integration into SAP BTP for compliance reporting give the customer a system built to stay reliable as it grows.

• Automated host-to-host banking operations. Payment processing and bank statement uploads now run automatically, freeing the finance team from manual data entry.

• A foundation for what's next. With the core system live and stable, the customer is now turning its attention to bringing payroll calculation into SAP.

Why ACBaltica?

• Deep expertise in SAP Controlling, including Overhead Cost Controlling and Profitability Analysis.

• Real experience designing reporting architectures for unconventional accounting models – including service businesses that treat people as cost and revenue objects.

• Basis and infrastructure capabilities spanning solution landscape design, hardware consulting, and SAP BTP integration.

• A flexible way of working with customers, including embedding individual specialists directly into a customer's own internally led team – not just taking on full project ownership