A SAP hosting project with SCA Hygiene comes up clean

A complex hosting project comes up clean

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Published on the 25/02/2014 | Written by SAP

AT A GLANCE

SCA Hygiene Australasia

INDUSTRY

FMCG

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Outsource all core business systems hosting to reduce costs and increase speed and efficiency

SOLUTION

SAP Global Partner Hosting supplied by NTT DATA Business Solutions

THE BENEFITS

Significant cost reductions
24/7 support at the data centre
Minimal disruption to business as usual

FOR MORE INFORMATION

SAP
P: 1800 287 727
E: info.australia@sap.com
E: info.newzealand@sap.com
W: www.sap.com/australia

When SCA Hygiene Australasia decided to outsource its entire SAP system it needed to know it would continue to be in the hands of experts long after the initial migration…

SCA Hygiene Australasia is the leading manufacturer of tissue and personal care hygiene products in Australasia and produces recognised name brand products for these markets. Headquartered in Australia’s Box Hill, it’s a joint venture between SCA, a global hygiene and paper company with approximately 45,000 employees and products sold across some 100 countries, and Pacific Equity Partners (PEP), a leading Australasian private equity fund with expertise in the FMCG sector.

The firm maintains its own production facilities in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji for these products. The diverse processes in operation at SCA Hygiene are supported by a complex SAP system landscape. Until 2011 the hosting was the purview of the SCA Europe internal IT department –the system operated on an AIX / Oracle platform in the company’s data centre in Sweden. But the lure of substantially reduced costs, as well as more speed and efficiency, led the responsible parties to begin to consider an external hosting of the system landscape.

Going outside
SCA Hygiene chose NTT DATA Business Solutions as its IT partner because as a certified exponent of SAP Global Partner Hosting it operates the most modern data centres in the world. Two of its most efficient data centres were available to SCA Hygiene in Cyberjaya in Malaysia. NTT DATA Business Solutions has also accumulated a treasure trove of project experience, and was in a position to offer a very good cost-benefit ratio, all of which contributed to its choice as partner for the hosting project.

SCA Hygiene’s business application manager, Dan Kotiah, explains: “In light of the project’s complexity and the extreme entrepreneurial risk which the migration represents for our business, it was good to know that our partner brings exactly the right experience. This could be seen in every step of the project – from detailed scoping, to the assembly of the infrastructure, all the way to successful migration. At all times we had access to an experienced team which finally brought us to a successful ‘go-live’.”

Making the migration
After the kick-off, the first objective was to transfer the entire SAP system landscape around the globe – with ERP system, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Business Information Warehouse (BW), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), the Portal Solution (EP) and the Process Integration (PI). Only three and a half months were available for the entire project and the data migration itself had to take place over just three days, which was the maximum possible downtime.

It turned out that the PI (Process Integration) area had to be re-implemented, as no copies of the previously used solution were allowed to be constructed. And in order to achieve the targeted savings, the NTT DATA Business Solutions team also moved the systems from the AIX platform to Suse Linux.

Andrea Bell, CIO for SCA Hygiene said it was a joy to see the passion that the NTT DATA Business Solutions team brought to this project “It fit perfectly with our well thought out high availability scenario.”

Entering a virtual world
To achieve the necessary availability, the NTT DATA Business Solutions team used virtualisation technology, virtualising the servers in the data centre and complementing them with SAN (Storage Area Network) storage. They are using the ‘Dual Data Concept’ which uses a virtual area with two mirror-imaged SAN systems divided between two locations, so if one data centre location suffers downtime, the integrity of the system will be preserved and all data backed up at the other location. SingTel, a telecommunications service provider which is active in the USA and Asia Pacific region among other places, is responsible for the 10 Mbps connection and an internet VPN connection provides additional back-up.

Mission complete
The project was finished just in time. Three business partners were even linked into the SAP Net Weaver Process Integration via the appropriate interfaces at go-live. Now the expert personnel in the NTT DATA Business Solution co-location data centre make sure, in a three-shift operational rotation, that the solution is dependably available 24/7, all week long. On top of that, SCA Hygiene now uses the NTT DATA Business Solutions central fax service.

“Aside from the planned downtime of three days for the migration we barely noticed the moving of the systems”, reports CIO Andrea Bell. “Everything went according to plan and the result is fantastic: reaction times are far better and we are saving on costs as well. We are very satisfied and look forward to a long and successful partnership with NTT DATA Business Solutions.”