Boels is Europe’s second-largest provider of rental equipment, tools and machines for the construction industry. What started out in 1977 as a one-man operation in Pierre Boels Sr’s garage has since grown to a mega brand with a portfolio of over 860,000 rental items. The company is now active in 27 countries, and it’s still growing fast.
‘Our growth strategy at Boels is a combination of organic growth and acquisitions’, explains Ralf Alofs, Head of Finance Transformation & PMO. An important step was their takeover of the Finnish rental firm Cramo in 2020, which significantly increased Boels’s footprint. More recently, they took over Riwal, a Dutch company that rents out aerial work platforms, telehandlers and forklifts in 14 countries
Harmonising business processes
To keep pace with its growth, Boels needed to streamline its internal work processes, including its Finance department’s workflows.
‘The organisational structure at Boels is quite centralised, compared to Cramo, which was very decentralised’, explains Erik Simons, SAP Director at PwC, who worked along with Aiden on the implementation project. ‘We needed to help merge them into a single, truly centralised organisation to give them full control of processes such as purchasing, which is vital to any rental company. The more efficient your purchasing is, the greater your profitability.’
Ralf recalls, ‘We needed an IT landscape that could handle our growth. But maybe even more importantly, we needed a firm foundation for offering the best possible service to our customers and suppliers. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for companies to become customers, to change their details and rent from us. And of course, also for them to be able get the right equipment for the right price. After that, they also need to get a clear invoice from us, and we want to make the payment process as easy as possible for them.’
Laying the groundwork for integration
To ensure a consistent approach throughout all its different national markets, Boels needed to upgrade its company’s IT landscape. They had been using SAP ECC on the backend, along with a separate system for managing the rentals. At Cramo, those two systems were integrated into a single solution.
Boels chose to replace its various systems with a single new ERP: SAP Cloud ERP Private.
‘This immediately gave them a firm foundation that they could continue to build upon’, says Simons. ‘For example, we decided to create a single chart of accounts and a single profit-centre structure for reporting, focusing on the different product groups that Boels and Cramo offer. This enables them to work much more efficiently under an approach we called One Finance’.
‘The biggest benefit is that we’re now all working in the same way, with a single chart of accounts and standardised processes. That makes us a lot more efficient and keeps us all on the same page as an organisation. It’s been a major improvement.’
Step-by-step migration
The migration from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA was completed in 2022.
‘This migration was a vital step towards process harmonisation at Boels’, says Peter Sanders, Senior Project Manager at Aiden. ‘We started with the technical migration and then supported them step by step to transition to the new way of working and make sure everyone was on board with the changes. PwC was in charge of the program management and change management, and we took care of the technical side of setting up the new system’.
After optimising Boels Central Europe as a foundation, the team gradually integrated Cramo locations into the central process step by step.
A unified way of working
Boels’s harmonisation efforts are already paying off. Peter says that the new, consolidated approach to handling financial data makes month-end closing much more efficient than before. ‘Boels used to have to gather data from multiple systems, but now they have a single system, which makes the process a lot quicker.’
Ralf says the new, unified way of working has made it easier for teams to collaborate and align with one another. ‘The biggest benefit is that we’re now all working in the same way, with a single chart of accounts and standardised processes. That makes us a lot more efficient and keeps us all on the same page as an organisation. It’s been a major improvement.’
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