When divestiture and modernization collide

A medical device manufacturer undergoing a major corporate divestiture faced a difficult constraint in its Dental business unit. The business was fully separated operationally, but customer-facing processes were trapped in a very old Infor A+ ERP.

Customer onboarding took weeks. Payment collection was deeply broken, with only 40% of outstanding invoices collected and the remainder sold to debt collectors. eProcurement integrations required manual data propagation. Growth was constrained not by demand, but by execution.

An ERP migration to S/4HANA seemed inevitable—but forcing a migration during divestiture introduced unacceptable risk, cost, and distraction at the worst possible time.

The false choice between migration and stagnation

The business was presented with two familiar options.

They could force an immediate ERP migration, accepting:

• High execution risk during a critical divestiture

• Significant cost and resource diversion

• Potential delays to separation timelines

Or they could postpone modernization and accept:

• Continued poor customer experience

• Persistently broken payment collection

• Ongoing growth constraints

• A crisis-driven migration later

Neither option aligned with business reality. Migration solved a technical problem, not an immediate revenue problem.

A third path: modernize while extending legacy investment

Instead of migrating ERP, the company deployed viax as a modern customer-facing execution layer on top of the existing Infor A+ backend.

This allowed them to:

• Complete the divestiture cleanly, without ERP disruption

• Modernize immediately, improving onboarding and payments

• Extend the Infor A+ investment for years without compromise

• Simplify a future S/4HANA migration by extracting complexity upfront

Customer-facing transformation happened immediately. ERP migration became a business-timed decision, not a forced response to broken processes.

Separating customer experience from backend processing

With this architecture, responsibilities were clearly divided.

viax handled customer-facing execution, including:

• Automated B2B customer onboarding and validation

• eProcurement integrations (Dentira, Coupa, Ariba)

• Modern payment portal and invoice tracking

• Patient-level invoice breakdowns

• Order and fulfillment visibility

Infor A+ continued as the stable backend, handling:

• Basic order processing

• Fulfillment execution

• Financial transactions

• System-of-record responsibilities

Customers never interacted directly with Infor A+. viax orchestrated workflows and passed clean transactions into the backend.

Immediate business outcomes without migration

Modernization delivered tangible results without touching ERP.

• Customer onboarding: Weeks → seconds through automation, enabling volume growth

• Payment collection: Improving from a 40% baseline; every percentage point increase delivered immediate ROI

• eProcurement: ~40% of revenue shifted from manual propagation to automated, real-time integration

• Invoice transparency: Patient-level breakdowns enabled dental practices to bill accurately

• Order visibility: Manual tracking replaced with clear, self-service insight

The value of improved payment collection alone justified the implementation—years before any ERP migration.

Why sequencing matters

Divestitures demand stability, predictability, and low risk. ERP migrations introduce uncertainty, cost variability, and operational disruption.

By deferring migration while modernizing execution:

• The divestiture completed cleanly

• The backend remained stable and predictable

• Customer experience improved immediately

• Future migration scope was dramatically reduced

This wasn’t technical debt. It was strategic sequencing.

When the business eventually migrates to S/4HANA, over 80% of customer-facing logic will already be outside ERP. The migration will focus only on vanilla order processing, fulfillment, and financials.

Why this pattern matters

Legacy ERP systems don’t prevent modernization—conflating the two creates false choices.

This company modernized customer experience, improved cash collection, and enabled growth without forcing ERP migration during divestiture. At the same time, it set up a cleaner, lower-risk path to S/4HANA.

Extend the legacy investment. Modernize now. Simplify the future.

That’s strategic modernization—not lift-and-shift.