How the Madrid City Council Successfully Migrated to SAP S/4HANA

At 3:00 p.m. on a Thursday, employees of the Madrid City Council left their workplaces. The following Monday at 9:00 a.m., they returned to find a completely new system. During that interval, the full migration to SAP S/4HANA was carried out—that is, the migration of the financial system of a large municipal administration. And all of this without a single critical incident.

An achievement worthy of the community this public entity serves. With 3.3 million inhabitants, an annual budget of €7 billion, and 30,000 municipal employees, the Spanish capital is one of Europe’s major metropolises. “When I attend international meetings, I always say that Madrid is like a small nation. In terms of complexity, it is comparable to countries such as Estonia or Lithuania,” says Ángel Fernández Bueno, Deputy Director General of Corporate IT Systems at the Madrid City Council (IAM). The city covers many of the functions of a state, such as healthcare, education, taxation, and sanctions. For example, it processes 2.5 million traffic fines each year. All these critical functions were based on the SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), implemented between 2004 and 2006. However, the coexistence of financial and human resources modules within the same instance had become an obstacle. “It was like a battle every year to decide which would go first and to check whether the other would be affected,” explains the Deputy Director General. Updates to one blocked the evolution of the other.