On October 9, 2025, Alliance Laundry Systems completed its IPO and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange and began trading under the ticker symbol ALH. With more than 115 years of history and periods of both public and private ownership, the move to a standalone public company marked a significant milestone in the organization’s ongoing evolution.

With this transition came a renewed focus on process standardization and a commitment to fully leveraging strategic assets like SAP to support continued growth and operational excellence. As Alliance Laundry looks ahead to S/4HANA, establishing a smart, fit-for-purpose setup was critical to maximizing the journey.

The Challenge

When faced with a move to S/4HANA, organizations typically choose between two paths.

The first path is to minimize disruption, investing time and money to ensure Day One looks as close to the current state as possible. When this approach is taken, the initiative often feels like something happening to the business rather than for the business. The second path is to seize the opportunity to level up, activate SAP as a true business system, and put teams firmly in the driver’s seat. Choosing this second path required time, focus, and a willingness to change how work was being done today in order to capitalize on SAP’s capabilities post go-live. The key question became clear:

What could be done now to deliver rapid results while preparing for S/4HANA?

The Decision

For the Supply Chain organization at Alliance Laundry Systems, the decision was clear. SAP is a vital enabler of scalability, and the team committed to putting SAP to work in support of their business goals. In the team's own words:

We must rely on the system to adhere to our business rules, allowing us to focus on managing exceptions while eliminating non-value-adding tasks.

At the time, several challenges stood in the way:

• Offline work in Excel, custom transactions, and third-party tools limiting visibility and complicating upgrades
• Confusion about how SAP is designed to work, driven by years of conflicting guidance that eroded confidence
• Missing daily habits to keep data clean and current
• Repurposed master data fields restricting future capabilities
• Information overload as teams attempted to sort through what S/4HANA could enable

To address these challenges and move toward their goals, Alliance partnered with Reveal. Immediate priorities focused on fueling curiosity, correcting misinformation, cleaning up data and process deviations where standard existed, and capturing rapid results available today.

The Transformation

As Alliance prepared to work with its chosen systems integrator, readiness became paramount. Teams needed to be equipped to engage in critical conversations and make confident, informed decisions. Together, Alliance and Reveal focused on:

• Documenting current processes versus SAP standard and piloting standard processes immediately
• Improving understanding of master data and evaluating field purpose and usage
• Preparing teams for key design and governance decisions ahead
• Eliminating spreadsheets to build confidence in SAP logic and execution
• Establishing reporting, actions, and oversight to keep the system clean as a daily habit
• Working side by side on real, emerging scenarios to put SAP to work and build momentum

This work was grounded in daily operations and real SAP execution, not theory.

The Result

The commitment shown by Alliance teams across functions and facilities has been exceptional. Collaboration, ownership, and a shared drive for excellence were evident throughout the initiative. Key outcomes include:

• KPIs that drive performance and improve end-to-end visibility, including 14% Days On Hand Improvement
• ‍Reduced reliance on third-party tools and spreadsheets
• A proactive, exception-minded approach to daily work
• Capacity evaluation and material availability checking within SAP
• A full suite of end-to-end procurement tools
• An operationally feasible cycle count program
• A team far more fluent in how SAP works and what it can deliver

The journey to S/4HANA is exciting and rich with opportunity. It is also demanding in terms of time, investment, and change. Left unmanaged, it can introduce confusion, fatigue, and suboptimal decision-making. By taking a fit-for-purpose approach and focusing on readiness, Alliance Laundry Systems is demonstrating how to safely unlock value while preparing for what’s next. The dedication, ownership, and desire to continuously improve shown by these teams is a privilege to witness.

This story is not over.
Consider this the first installment.