Royal Schiphol Group

Royal Schiphol Group is an airport company and plays an important social and economic role. The group owns and operates Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Rotterdam The Hague Airport, Lelystad Airport, and has a majority stake in Eindhoven Airport. Its ambition: to create the most sustainable and high-quality airports in the world.

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is one of the world's best connected airports, providing direct connections to 316 international destinations. Royal Schiphol Group has an average turnover of €1.5 billion and employs over 2,500 people.

Our approach

In late 2018, the Digital Finance Program (DFP) was launched within the Finance, Procurement and IT departments. A strategic programme that helps Schiphol Royal Group realise its Finance Vision 2025. Namely: a new standardised way of working, simplifying and automating end-to-end processes in a cloud-based system. The programme realises a future-proof platform where Finance's role is more focused on creating insight from data. We replace the outdated 'on premise' systems with future Cloud solutions: Oracle ERP Cloud, OneStream EPM (planning, budgeting & financial consolidation) and Gotransverse (billing & subscription). For the past three years, Improven has been supporting Royal Schiphol Group with several people in different roles in the following areas:

  • Programme Management: responsible for delivering DFP by managing the programme team and IT suppliers and senior stakeholder management.
  • PMO: setting up the Project Management Office (PMO) to best support and inform the programme. This includes setting up programme governance and structure, preparing steering committee meetings, keeping track of (milestone) planning and monitoring actions, issues and risks.
  • Change management: preparing business impact assessments and transition plans to best guide end-users through the change, streamlining internal and external communication, coordinating training, setting up a business support model after go live, collecting lessons learned and organising retrospectives.
  • Integrations: coordinating integrations between different systems for the purpose of implementing Oracle Cloud.
  • Data migration: coordinating the migration of data from various systems for the implementation of Gotransverse.

Result

In 2020, Oracle ERP Cloud and OneStream EPM successfully went live.

A phased approach has been adopted for the implementation of Gotransverse and is currently largely live. The Digital Finance Programme is expected to be completed in its entirety by 2022. With these future-proof systems, the programme has laid a foundation for further optimisations, such as robotics, artificial intelligence and process mining.

The new systems are used by almost all of Schiphol Group's 2,500 employees, making the impact enormous. Through transparent communication, attention to the end users and the constant collection and adjustment of feedback, we were able to successfully implement the change at Schiphol Group.