Consultor SAP-SD

for Customer Services world-wide, SAP Subject Matter Expert. I started at Coty in The Netherlands, then France, then moved to Barcelona to join the Center of Expertise. Coty produces perfumes and beauty products, its products are better known under their brand names such as Chloé, Calvin Klein, Davidoff, etc. In 2017 the company acquired about 40 new brands which doubled the size of the company. Coty is trading on Wall Street.



I started my work at Coty under a freelance contract, to analyze a part (product allocation) of their SAP system that they weren't happy with. This included interviewing several people in IT and the business, to understand the application functionally and technically. I then recommended several improvements, some of which I could implement immediately, some by config, some by coding (Abap), all done by myself. Coty was quite small then!

At the end of my contract, they hired me. I became their first in-house consultant, with all their projects being run by Accenture. I travelled to all European offices to address issues and change requests. These were in the area of order placement (EDI, link with SAP-CRM, manual entry), customer consignment orders, pricing, management of deliveries, reporting (feed into SAP-BI), some billing, inter-company billing, rebates. (Coty is a consumer goods company, with lots of pricing and clauses such as rebates or free goods).

They made me travel to the USA one week per month for validations of designs on the local project there, so now my role was project/support.

Later we did a project for all European countries, around the product allocation topic mentioned earlier. This included lots of coding, based on my functional designs, working closely together with Accenture's development center near Barcelona.

I also travelled to the project in Ashford, UK, where the plant was being put on SAP. On my suggestion we added shipment documents to the mix, including the printing of documentation for the trucks upon reaching a certain status.

After this the Centre of Expertise (COE) was officially started and I relocated to Barcelona. I became the Team Lead for the Commercial COE (around 10 people reporting to me).

Sometime in 2016 Coty doubled in size by acquiring brands from Proctor & Gamble. We did a crazy project to integrate all that into our system, I was travelling 90% of my time, trying to understand the P&G needs and explaining our system, find the best solution for the new company. As a team lead, 85% of my time I was doing actual work, 15% of my time I was managing people. The project added many more countries to SAP, now also including Asia (total 196 sales orgs).

After this went live the entire COE went mostly into support mode. Our ticket system Tivoli was replaced by Remedy. We had already added Solution Manager, we now also added MDG, Ariba and New-GL (which is in the Finance module but with implications in SD). We tried to force our templates onto all sites, which meant that most warehouses worked with SAP-WM.

I was heavily involved in the intercompany business, which worked with planning input from Manugistics, used to create sales orders and purchase orders, as well as stock transport orders. Manugistics used our SD Logistics Info System data for its planning.