Greek gaming leader optimizes its financial operations with S/4HANA on Azure

OPAP is the leading gaming company in Greece and one of the most renowned in its industry internationally. It is a sector leader in embedding global Responsible Gaming principles in its operations and supports Greek society in practice through an extensive corporate responsibility program focusing on health, sports and employment.

As part of its Fast Forward business strategy, exploring cutting-edge technology is a key priority for OPAP. In view of this, it works towards supporting its business activities, enhancing its performance and everyday operations, optimizing its processes, and evolving its technology infrastructure.

In this context, OPAP decided to use SAP S/4HANA, a world-class ERP system. For fast and reliable results, it implemented SAP solutions on Azure. Now, the company easily runs reports with large amounts of data, sees no downtime when deploying new functionalities, and monitors costs and inventory without hassle.

“As part of our process optimization strategy, we decided to change our ERP system and move financial operations to the cloud. As we were using on-premises technology, we occasionally faced performance and operational issues,” says Dora Antoniadou, Financial Applications Technology Specialist at OPAP.

Building a system suited to OPAP’s needs

To make sure the company chose the best strategy for its new ERP system, a request for proposal was made. Real Consulting won the bid and became OPAP’s partner for this project.

“Together with Real Consulting, we decided to go for a strategy based on SAP’s S/4HANA supported on Azure cloud. As we work only with encrypted data, we chose Azure because it ensures a high level of security,” says Antoniadou.

“Azure was the best option for the new OPAP S/4HANA system. By combining solution excellence and Real Consulting’s advanced expertise in this area, transition to the new environment was a smooth and non-disruptive process,” says Stelios Liapakis, Enterprise Architect, SAP Basis, at Real Consulting.

To fully cover the needs of its financial operations, OPAP implemented several S/4HANA modules: Financial Accounting and Controlling (FICO), Human Capital Management (HCM), Material Management (MM), and Sales Distribution (SD).

“Data migration to SAP S/4HANA on Azure took place while the system was up and running - thus, we had absolutely no downtime,” says Antoniadou.

“Microsoft’s contribution in implementation and issues resolution was essential. We’re very happy to see that everything was supported flawlessly,” adds Vassilis Maroulakis, System Engineer at OPAP.

As the project’s deployment only took a couple of weeks, the business benefits became apparent very soon for the OPAP team.

“Now, we experience no delays when running financial reports - even with large volumes of data. The system is always active, we experience no downtime when deploying new functionalities, and it’s very stable,” details Antoniadou.

“The apps are user-friendly, and since the information is aggregated on display, the time we need to collect the requested information gets reduced. As a result, we can better monitor costs and inventory within our departments,” adds Christos Kakouratos, Accounting Manager at OPAP.

As the S/4HANA implementation brought faster operations within several areas of the financial team, OPAP plans to expand its use in the company.

“We have started to discuss the activation of the SAP Enterprise Threat Detection functionality to enhance protection against cybersecurity threats and help ensure data loss prevention. The plan is to execute this solution with Real Consulting and Microsoft. Since our partnership has brought on significant achievements, it is natural to continue it,” concludes Antoniadou.