Vodafone Group Plc is the largest mobile service provider by revenue in the world, with 400 million customers across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and the United States. In 2012, it had revenues of $71.8 billion and over 86,000 employees working in over 40 countries. Since its founding 28 years ago, the business has experienced phenomenal growth, largely by establishing local operating companies that provided products and services to service their local markets. front-end processes were excluded from the first phase of the rollout to keep the transformation more manageable As a result, the company was very decentralized lacking common practices, centralized operations, and data sharing among its various operating companies Most of Voda independent companies with their own business processes. Vodafone was a network of individual busi nesses, but it wanted to function more like a single global firm to deal better with competitive pressures. Management called for a major business transformation to make this happen Procurement was targeted as the first set of processes to be transformed using the new ERP system. Vodafone had been allowing each of its local companies to manage its own procurement, which prevented it from leveraging the massive purchasing power the company could obtain by managing relationships with material and service suppliers from a single entity. By generating savings from centralized procurement, the transformation project would be able to quickly show a return on investment and win further support. Vodafone did not establish a centralized procurement department but in procurement company based in Luxembourg that uses the SAP ERP platform. Most of the company's spending goes through this central organization. Suppliers benefit because the system helps them plan their sales to Vodafone and they only need to work with a single purchaser instead of many. This new way of doing business included a new purchase-to-pay process in which Su ra ad created a centralized In 2006 Vodafone's board of directors approved the Evolution Vodafone" Business Transformation Program" (EVO) de truly global company, with a centralized shared s voices are approved automatically for payment by matching them with purchase orders and receipt ign ed to refashion Voda Once the new procurement process and organization were running, Vodafone started creating a centralized nd common worldwide bu s processes ances, human resources, and supply chain manage shared services organization based on the SAP ERP Shared ser ystem. It selected Budapest, Hungary as the pilot location me refers to the consolidation of business operations that are for this new arrangement. Vodafone Hungary is a mid-sized used by multiple parts of the same organization in order company with 2,000 employees with a small IT platform to reduce costs and redundancy.) A common SAP ERP based on Oracle software. This made Vodafone Hungary (enterprise resource planning) system would provide the more receptive to changing its information system and technology platform for these changes by supporting information-sharing and common business processes that would simplify and speed up work throughout the There Vodafone built an entire shared services organization company. Additional software tools from Informatica, Opentext, Readsoft, Sabrix, Redwood, HP, and Remedy ERP system. Vodafone then set up two more shared that could integrate with SAP were added to the mix. business processes than Vodafone organizations in larger countries, and Hungary had been using Oracle systems. from scratch while simultaneously implementing the SAP services organizations in India running on SAP o be one of the biggest After Hungary, Vodafone implemented the new procurement process and SAP software for its German SAP ERP implementations in the world. How did Voda- Vodafo ra s Vodaf ertise and resources more than 20 percen market, and is res Voda realized the company l ma ro l revenue. Voda Germa mu ed the con rger organization than Voda e Hungary, with 13,000 rojec required and which were not a s processes to replace. Work ha ched, and Vodafone encoun were more deeply entren ered some employee resistance The company spent a year ident ng i tried to impleme ew ems and processes. To minimize risk, Voda project. The management team wanted to limit risks t non-customer-facing processes that were nevertheless important sources of value for the firm. Customer-facing tone used a phased, incremental implementation, did remendous amount of testing, and made all the neces- sary system modifications before the system went live