From ECC to S/4HANA, without a single gap in safety

A system that decides who can start work

Work Clearance Management (WCM) decides whether a maintenance job can start on a live production line. It governs how risks are assessed, how permits are approved, and what has to be signed off before anyone touches equipment.

At Lanxess's site in the Port of Antwerp, that system needed to move from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. The requirement wasn't just to migrate it; it was to migrate it without changing how a single check worked. For a speciality chemicals site, a permit process that behaves differently for even a few days is not an acceptable side effect of an IT project.

From ECC to S/4HANA: replicate first, simplify second

The primary objective was to move the existing WCM configuration to S/4HANA while keeping every safety-relevant check exactly as it was. Alongside that, Emixa used the migration to: 

• Simplify processes that existed in ECC but were already used in practice

• Align configuration with how S/4HANA is structured, rather than carrying over ECC-era workarounds 
• Leave a cleaner, more maintainable setup for the team that would run it day to day 

Checklist-driven workshop, not open-ended discussion

One of the reasons this held together was the workshop format Emixa used throughout. Instead of open-ended discussions, the team ran two checklist-driven workshops with clearly defined decision points. That meant: 

• Every topic was worked through systematically, not left for a later meeting
• Decisions were documented as they were made, not reconstructed afterward
• Configuration choices stayed visible to both teams throughout
• There was a clear reference to point to after go-live, when questions inevitably came up

When two projects collided

During implementation, two domains ran into each other: safety and maintenance execution. A piece of functionality on the maintenance execution side was getting in the way of how safety needed to work, and the cause wasn't obvious from either side alone. Rather than work out which domain was to blame, both teams treated it as one shared problem.

We worked through it shoulder to shoulder — sharing ownership of the investigation and going through how the two were interacting until the root cause came out. It's a slower way to start, but it's the way that kind of problem actually gets solved, and both teams came out of it in a stronger position.

The result: safety checks intact, ready for more sites

The migration went live with every WCM safety check carrying over unchanged. Lanxess now has:

• A simplified, standardised WCM configuration running natively on S/4HANA
• ECC-era workarounds removed rather than carried forward
• The same permit, risk-assessment and approval logic the site relied on before the migration
• A setup built to be reused 

“The structured workshop approach ensured clarity in every decision we made. It gave us confidence that nothing was overlooked and that the WCM migration was fully aligned with our safety and operational requirements.”

— Dirk Meuser, Head of Asset Management and Plant Maintenance, Lanxess NV

What actually made this work

The Lanxess migration didn't come down to a technical checklist. It came down to workshops that had checklists, and two teams that treated a shared problem as exactly that, shared.

That combination is what let Lanxess move a safety-critical system to S/4HANA without a single gap in how permits are assessed, approved and enforced.