TUI Deutschland GmbH was founded in 1968 and is headquartered in Hanover. It is the leading tour operator in Germany and a wholly owned subsidiary of the TUI Group, the world's largest tourism group. The tour operator is responsible for the creation, distribution and marketing of vacation tours on the German market.
The customer's task included the introduction of SAP software for the processes in the "order-to-cash" environment, which is home to accounts receivable, accounting and controlling, as a prerequisite for replacing the previously used Oracle eBusiness Suite. Furthermore, a large number of tourism systems were connected to the new solution, including various reservation and booking systems, tools for customer and agency master data management, and a BI solution.
The project team consisted of around 50 technical specialists from TUI in the areas of accounts receivable, financial accounting and controlling and up to 30 IT experts from team neusta, who acted as project managers, project management office, functional consultants, ABAP developers, BI developers, test managers, trainers and cut-over managers, among others.
Project management methods used included combinations of agile elements as well as the classic waterfall method. "One of the challenges within the project was to design a solution within the SAP standard processes as much as possible, without a lot of customization on the customer side," explained Gabriele Koch, the project manager at neusta enterprise services. It was also important to implement an SAP system for the German market with the option of "rolling out" this solution to other European countries.
Another special feature is the fully automated processes for processing mass data from the upstream tourism systems. This includes master data such as customers, agencies, transaction data for tourism bookings, rebookings as well as cancellations. Another challenge to the success of the project was the data migration from the previous system, Oracle eBusiness Suite.
SAP SD was implemented for order management, SAP FI for accounting, an SAP SD/FI interface for communication between the two areas, and an SAP/Oracle interface for accessing the Oracle database.
After a project duration of more than two years, team neusta successfully implemented an SAP industry solution for tourism at the market leader TUI. Since then, all tourism bookings of the tour operator TUI Deutschland have been processed in the new SAP solution. Due to the very high daily data volume, this is done within the framework of fully automated processes.
After accounts payable accounting with the tourism service providers had already been converted to SAP in a previous project phase, it was finally possible to completely replace the 20-year-old Oracle system.
The new overall SAP solution is now being rolled out to other international TUI subsidiaries - with the continued cooperation of neusta enterprise services.
Cover photo: TUI Group
