CAP Group: Powering growth and controlling complexity by shifting into the cloud
Taking a clean core approach with RISE with SAP
As CAP Group has expanded and diversified, its business and IT landscapes have become more complex. CAP’s partnership with SAP ensures that its core ERP systems continue to evolve to meet business needs. Moving into the cloud with the RISE with SAP solution is the latest step in its ongoing campaign to control complexity and enable growth.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Mining, Industrial Manufacturing | Santiago, Chile | 4,800 employees |
Reduction in time spent on financial close process
Saving in time spent on system maintenance
More time to focus on development and innovation
Assistant Director of Technology, CAP Group
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Mining, Industrial Manufacturing | Santiago, Chile | 4,800 employees |
Reduction in time spent on financial close process
Saving in time spent on system maintenance
More time to focus on development and innovation
Assistant Director of Technology, CAP Group
Evolving to support a growing business
Over the past two decades, CAP Group has grown and diversified its operations across mining, steelmaking, and steel products for construction and industrial use cases. As its business expanded, CAP recognized that it needed to evolve its systems and processes to keep complexity under control. As a result, it decided to become one of the first companies in Latin America to migrate its ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA.
“Moving from our old SAP environment to SAP S/4HANA was a major project, and because we were early adopters, there was very little knowledge in the market about how to migrate,” explains Laura Grimau, Assistant Director of Technology at CAP Group. “As a result, we decided to engage with SAP directly, which was the start of a successful partnership.”
After five years of success with running SAP S/4HANA on premises, it was time to upgrade again—but this time, CAP was ready to move into the cloud.
“When you’re managing your own infrastructure, you’re responsible for everything,” says Laura Grimau. “You have to be constantly thinking about performance and security. Even if you have a partner doing the day-to-day maintenance, you still have to check that they are applying the right security patches and so on. It is a distraction from what you should be focusing on—supporting your users and delivering innovation. So, we believe that the cloud is inevitably going to be the way forward.”
Assistant Director of Technology, CAP Group
Realizing the potential of a shift to the cloud
CAP Group had already adopted several public cloud solutions from SAP, including the SAP SuccessFactors platform for HR, but its core ERP applications were still on premises. When the opportunity arose to shift its SAP S/4HANA landscape into the private cloud with the RISE with SAP solution, CAP’s IT team immediately saw the potential.
“We liked the fact that with RISE with SAP, everything is consolidated in one package,” says Laura Grimau. “SAP does the hosting, they take care of the performance and security of the environment, and they do all the updates. And when new functionality is released, it’s available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition straight away, so we get immediate access.”
Working directly with SAP once again, CAP Group completed the migration to RISE with SAP within just six months. “It was time for us to upgrade to a new version of SAP S/4HANA anyway and moving to RISE with SAP gave us access to SAP’s highly specialized cloud migration team,” says Laura Grimau. “Their expertise meant we could complete the migration with less downtime than an on-premises upgrade would have required—and that ability to minimize the disruption for our users helped to build a strong business case.”
Assistant Director of Technology, CAP Group
Intuitive applications built on a clean core
Today, CAP Group has all its core finance, controlling, plant maintenance, supply chain management, and logistics processes running in the cloud with RISE with SAP. It has also adopted the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation application for group financial consolidation, the SAP Analytics Cloud solution for data-driven budgeting and forecasting, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions for HR.
To make it easy for users to access the functionality they need, CAP has used SAP Build Work Zone to create a homepage that links directly to all these applications, as well as forms and workflows built with the SAP Fiori design system. “The user experience with SAP Fiori is far more intuitive,” says Laura Grimau. “Ultimately, we want to use it for all our approval flows—for purchase requisitions, purchase orders, invoices, payment reviews,and so on.”
CAP is also a big proponent of SAP’s Clean Core Approach, aiming to remove legacy custom code from its core SAP applications and develop extensions using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) instead. “We’re working on a solution for budget analytics with SAP BTP, and it’s a much cleaner and more maintainable approach,” says Laura Grimau.
Throughout the journey to RISE with SAP, CAP has maintained a close relationship with SAP. “We have weekly meetings to discuss what we want to do next, when we should do it, and what the risks and contingencies are,” says Laura Grimau. “The proactive follow-up we get from the SAP team is very gratifying.”
Assistant Director of Technology, CAP Group
Platform for innovation delivers measurable benefits
By upgrading to the latest version of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, CAP benefits from faster access to information, which helps to accelerate many of its most important financial processes. For example, its month-end financial close process now runs up to 25% faster, giving accountants and controllers more time to handle issues during the critical pre-close period. It has also gained access to new functionality for budget control and improved its auditing capabilities.
From an infrastructure perspective, shifting the company’s largest SAP solutions into the cloud has also reduced the amount of time the IT team needs to spend on maintenance and system upgrades by 20%, and gives them 10% more time to focus on development and innovation.
Feedback from users has been positive, too, as Laura Grimau explains: “Our users were involved in the project from day one and we sought their input at every stage. They felt that they were part of the change, which meant instead of resisting it, they advocated for it.”
Now, CAP has the platform it needs to start taking advantage of next-generation technologies, such as SAP Business AI. “We are currently developing a digital maturity roadmap to enable us to embrace AI initiatives,” concludes Laura Grimau.