Case Study: Vodafone achieves significant cost efficiencies with SAP Ariba

How One Telecommunications Company Achieved Significant Cost Efficiencies by Transforming Its Back-Office and Support Operations

Vodafone, a global telecommunications leader connecting hundreds of millions of customers and running Europe’s largest 5G and IoT networks, faced a legacy IT challenge: its single-instance SAP ECC was slow, heavily customized, and made real-time reporting and automation difficult. The company needed a KPI-driven business case and middle-management buy-in to standardize processes, improve employee experience, and shift routine tasks to automation to stay competitive in a fast-evolving industry.

Vodafone executed a two-step migration—moving its database from Oracle to SAP HANA, then converting ECC to SAP S/4HANA with SAP Fiori—across 22 countries in 18 months with Accenture and SAP support, while rolling out cloud solutions (Concur, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass). The move delivered higher automation and standardization, notable cost savings, minimal business disruption, broad user adoption (about 12,000 professional users and ~93,000 employees on Fiori), and a platform ready for further AI/ML-driven efficiency gains.

Vodafone

Holger Grewe

Head of Corporate Transformation