PAR — Problem, Action, Result

Question: "Have you ever managed a post-deployment crisis?"

Problem: three weeks after go-live of a SAP S/4HANA Finance implementation for a food-industry group, monthly closing was impossible — 800 accounting documents stuck on integration errors. The CFO threatened to withhold payment of the final instalment unless the problem was fixed within 72 hours.

Action: set up a war room with 3 SAP consultants and a BPC expert. Within 6 hours, identified a misconfigured profit-centre mapping from the legacy data migration. Developed a batch-correction ABAP program, tested it in sandbox, had it validated by the client, then applied it in production within a 4-hour maintenance window.

Result: 100% of documents unblocked, monthly closing completed just 3 days late. The client approved payment and renewed the contract for the AMS phase. This case is now built into the post-go-live quality-control runbook.

Question: "Describe how you managed a major security incident."

Problem: in October 2022, ransomware was spreading across the network of a client industrial group. At 3 am, 40% of Windows workstations were encrypted. The production line across 4 plants was at risk of a complete shutdown within 6 hours.

Action: immediately activated the business continuity plan and isolated the compromised network segments. Notified the French cybersecurity agency (ANSSI), triggered the cyber-insurance policy, and brought in a forensics provider. Kept production running at the 3 uncompromised plants by manually failing over to air-gapped backup systems. Within 18 hours, restored critical systems from clean backups from the day before.

Result: zero production downtime, all 400 workstations fully restored within 5 days. Total cost: €380K (€290K covered by cyber insurance). Afterwards: rolled out a Zero Trust architecture and an EDR programme — attack surface cut by 65% within 12 months.