Riddell is the industry leader in the football protective equipment market, including helmets, shoulder pads, reconditioning services, and more. For 96 years, the company has prided itself on making the game safer and enabling players to perform at their best, in-line with its vision to boldly champion the future of football.
“The business will always rely on its industry-leading team selling through an institutional business model but has evolved in recent years to be more consumer-facing, data-driven, and insight-driven, so we can help the coaches and the players with relevant information on how they can improve performance,” Aravind Kashyap, Chief Information Officer, Riddell, said. For example, Riddell innovated with smart helmets that utilize the Internet of Things (IoT) to get deeper insights into head impact exposure and athlete performance. “The company itself has gone through several routes of transformation because the game and its players demand it,” he said.
Riddell is now transforming its enterprise foundation, embarking on a robust, three-year enterprise solutions revamp. The company has used SAP solutions for almost 20 years, and its current solution is highly customized and very complex. “We really want to get to a situation where we’re not uber customized and difficult to upgrade,” Kashyap said. To benefit from technologies like data visibility, process automation, and AI, the company is working with SAP and KaarTech, a global SAP consulting company, to adopt a cloud-first, clean core approach.
Legacy built it, strategy will fix it
Riddell is modernizing and simplifying its ERP system via a greenfield approach with RISE with SAP. “Our IT strategy is primarily looking at the next three years and what can we do at a foundation level, what are the things we’re doing on the information aspect, and what things we are doing for greater efficiency,” Kashyap said. The renewed IT strategy will enable the business to focus on growth, efficiency, and automation projects by leveraging information and advanced technologies while still driving down IT operation costs.
The project is as much about improving Riddell’s IT foundation as it is about improving the experience for employees who use the systems, many of which are remote. Kashyap explained the focus on delivering a modern digital experience across the company: “Digital experience is huge for us. In fact, that’s one of the big themes that I’m driving in the organization. How do I bring experience to our business users—whether they are in a warehouse, whether they are in a sales position, whether they are a finance clerk, whether they are in the manufacturing location or plant—and give them the best experience as a solution user?”
This is in alignment with the strategic business transformation and change management approach KaarTech recommended to Riddell. Connecting the technical ERP transformation to the consumer experience and sales side of the business was key. “If you just do a technical assessment and try to understand the IT landscape without connecting with the business, the transformation will go wrong,” Parameswaran N, vice president, KaarTech, said. He added: “We wanted this to be a business-led transformation and the business priorities and vision were much more than just a technical upgrade, so we mutually agreed that a greenfield approach was the right approach.”
As a result of a thorough migration readiness assessment exercise undertaken with KTERN.AI, a KaarTech proprietary digital transformation as a service (DXaaS) automation platform for SAP digital transformations, available on SAP Store, Riddell’s IT landscape was found to have 1,270 custom objects, 556 custom reports, 794 enhancements to standard programs, and 10 third-party integrations. The current endeavor, called Project STRIDE, aims to streamline these customizations and instead take a fit-to-standard approach wherever possible.
The team has identified about 180 global scope items and is looking at each one individually to compare the out-of-the-box scenario with the customization opportunity, Kashyap said. This process of determining what in the current system stays and what goes is time consuming and involves about 10% of the company’s 850 employees, he explained, but it’s also necessary to prioritizing the fit-to-standard and clean core approach. “It’s not easy, but that’s the only way it’s going to happen,” he said, adding that it’s a “one team, one platform” mindset. Keeping SAP S/4HANA as the core allows for a “limitless plane” on which Riddell can take advantage of innovative technologies like AI.
In addition to the Riddell team, who supplies the internal expertise, knowledge, and working experience to Project STRIDE, SAP helps with the valuation of each scope item and KaarTech helps with implementation.
“Our partners KaarTech and SAP are making it possible. It’s a long journey,” Kashyap said. “It’s about making the business comfortable with using the new enterprise solution.”
Project learnings—so far
Riddell’s Project STRIDE demonstrates the potential behind a fit-to-standard approach, how digital experience drives user adoption, and the need for strong governance to accelerate decision-making.
The path to the cloud and a clean core is a worthy cause to achieve long-term agility, but it’s as much a method shift as it is a mindset shift, Kashyap said. “It is an IT transformation; more importantly it is a business transformation.”
Gillian Hixson is an integrated communications specialist at SAP.
