Growing the expertise that runs the Red Bull SAP systems

The people answering Red Bull’s SAP requests spent three years learning the environment first.

Red Bull sells in more than 175 countries, and the business keeps changing shape as it grows.

SAP sits at the centre of how Red Bull plans its finances and runs its supply chain, and keeping it aligned with a business that rarely stands still is the SAP department’s job. That makes the choice of partner one Red Bull lives with for years, and Red Bull chose Sync over the large consulting firms because Sync would build a team around its own environment and stay closer to it than a large global vendor could.

Eleven years later that team runs SAP application management, infrastructure and cloud, DevOps and project delivery, and it is ten times the size it started at. One partner across all of it means the people who pick up a piece of work already know the environment it sits in.

Complex problems that needed their experience waited behind work that did not, taking time and focus away from senior consultants

SAP support takes time, and at Red Bull’s size there is a lot of it. Those requests landed with the senior consultants, so the complex problems that needed their experience waited behind work that did not. Nothing had gone wrong. The business had grown past the shape of the team around it.

Finding people with the right SAP background takes months, and the ones who arrive do not know the project or the way the team works, so the first stretch goes into learning both. An expertise profile that says SAP does not say Red Bull culture and way of working, so Sync decided to grow RedBull’s SAP expertise through its own Sync Academy.

A growth timeline that scales RedBull SAP Expertise through the Sync SAP Academy

The SAP Academy is Sync's own training programme, and it moves people through every module and every support service until they are specialists on a dedicated team.

The first two weeks go to Sync's internal tools and procedures, before any SAP work begins. From there they spend six months on basic applications, with evaluation at each stage, then three more on SAP authorisations across all modules. Formal SAP training starts at month nine and runs to the end of the first year, with a tutor of their own and structured self-study.

Between eighteen months and two years, they take their first L2 topics and their specialisation starts to take shape.

By year three, Sync confirms which team they join, and they move across.

TESTIMONIAL

"We stopped tracking how often something broke, because the things we used to measure stopped happening."

70%

faster resolution of support tickets

24%

increase in team productivity

Red Bull ended up with a larger SAP team, no drop in service quality and no interruption while it happened, with room to absorb ticket spikes and whatever the business takes on next.

The people coming out of Sync’s SAP Academy already knew the environment, the tools and how the partnership worked. They took on all of L1 support, so business users across the organisation got their issues resolved without a wait and the day ran the way it was meant to.

That freed the senior consultants for the complex work, giving back the operational freedom to focus on the growth that matters the most.

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