Success Story · Food & Beverage Manufacturing (Corporate Reorganisation)

Merging Two Businesses Into One Legal Entity, Without Missing a Beat

Two sister businesses already running on the same single instance of SAP S/4HANA were merged into one legal entity for strategic reasons. Newen led the systems side of that reorganisation, one chart of accounts, one set of master data, one company code, without either business missing a close.

The Challenge

Not every SAP transformation starts with a deal. Sometimes the trigger is a strategic decision inside a group that already owns both businesses: two sister companies, already running on the same single instance of SAP S/4HANA, needed to become one legal entity, for reasons of tax efficiency, simplified governance and a cleaner group structure. That framing changes the nature of the problem. This was not about connecting two different systems; both businesses were already on the same platform, using largely the same processes. The challenge was instead a company-code-level consolidation: collapsing two sets of financial books, two sets of customer and vendor master data and two operating structures into one, while both businesses kept trading, invoicing and closing their books throughout.

That kind of internal restructuring carries its own risk profile. Because the source and target both live inside the same SAP environment, there is no old system to decommission and no external integration to build. The risk sits entirely in getting the consolidation logic right: which entity's numbering conventions survive, how open balances transfer without double-counting, and how historical transactions remain fully reportable after the legal entity that created them technically ceases to exist.

How Newen Helped

Newen led the systems side of the reorganisation, designing and executing the company-code consolidation inside the shared SAP S/4HANA instance. That meant defining a single target chart of accounts and numbering convention, reconciling and merging customer and vendor master data where the two entities had historically dealt with overlapping counterparties, migrating open financial balances, and remapping plants, purchasing organisations and cost centres under the surviving legal entity, all without introducing a new system or disrupting either business's day-to-day transaction processing.

Because both businesses were already SAP-native, the programme could focus its energy where it mattered most: data integrity and audit continuity, rather than basic technical connectivity. Every historical transaction needed to remain traceable and reportable after the merger, a non-negotiable requirement for both statutory audit and the tax authorities reviewing the reorganisation.

The Results

The two businesses now operate as a single legal entity on the group's existing SAP S/4HANA instance, with one chart of accounts, one set of master data and one company code carrying forward full transactional history from both predecessor entities. Neither business experienced a disruption to its ability to trade, invoice or close its books through the transition, and the group achieved the tax, governance and structural simplification it was seeking, without the cost or risk of standing up new systems or running two entities in parallel for longer than strictly necessary.