Published on the 26/05/2014 | Written by SAP

AT A GLANCE

• ERM power

INDUSTRY

• Utilities

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

• Remove manual processes and spreadsheets.
• Improve accuracy of financial statements, reports and presentations.
• A system that can be leveraged across the organisation

SOLUTION

• SAP’s Business All-in-One.
• Professional services supplied by NTT DATA Business Solutions.

THE BENEFITS

• Increased accuracy, timeliness and clarity in financial reporting.
• Reduction in manual processes and fewer errors and omissions.
• Enhancement of management reporting capabilities.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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

When the utility company went through a period of sustained organisational growth it looked for a system that would inject increased accuracy and efficiency into its data handling and take the company into the future…

The largest privately-owned energy company in Australia, ERM Power’s businesses operate across the entire energy supply chain, with the company involved in building and financing power stations, natural gas exploration, transporting gas to power stations and electricity retailing to large corporate and industrial customers.

In 2008 ERM Power entered into a sustained growth phase, gaining approximately 100 employees over two years. As the business became larger and its entities more diverse and numerous, ERM Power’s reporting requirements also became more complex.The company had been relying on an internally-developed system that required excessive use of manual processes and spreadsheets. In addition to being an inefficient use of resources within the critical departments of finance and payroll, this system led to considerable inaccuracy in financial statements, reports and presentations.

“After a solid period of sustained growth and business activity, it was evident that we needed to transition to a new business process and reporting platform to sustain our high performance and ensure we continued driving towards our vision,” says Graeme Walker, chief financial officer at ERM Power. “We selected SAP on the basis of its functionality and extensive industry experience in energy and utilities. By choosing to deploy an SAP system, ERM is effectively establishing the basis for sustained levels of growth into the future.”

Implementation
SAP partner NTT DATA Business Solutions (formerly Extend Technologies) assisted ERM Power with the implementation of SAP’s Business All-in-One solution, which was scoped from July to mid-September 2009 and went live in February 2010.

According to Andrew Powell, general manager commercial for NTT DATA Business Solutions: “SAP All-in-One allowed ERM Power to re-engineer its current business processes by implementing best business practice which is inherent in the system.”

“In addition, SAP A1 provided a platform for company growth utilising modern data management techniques and tools,” says Powell. “The solution addressed ERM’s requirements for a common system framework to provide a central standard interface linking all applications; a supporting integration architecture to manage the integration between the various system components; workflow management; accurate and timely consolidated group reporting; business information and reporting; staff management and payroll processing, including timesheet and expenses management.”

The project was managed in three phases:
Phase 1: Management Reporting (Business Intelligence); Finance and Cost Centre Management including Asset Accounting (Finance and Controlling); Consolidations (Business Planning and Consolidations); Project Management (Internal Order Accounting).

Phase 2: Time and Expenses (HR/Payroll, Employee Self Service); Human Resources (HR/Payroll, Organisational Management, Employee Self Service).

Phase 3: Purchasing (Materials Management); BI and Reporting (Business Intelligence/Business Performance and Consolidations).

According to Powell, the key challenge was to deliver the project using minimal resources. “Due to ERM Power’s audit there were minimum resources available,” says Powell. “However, ERM Power’s chief financial officer and project manager were extremely supportive and pivotal to the project’s success.”

Results
Benefits reported by ERM Power since the completion of the project include increased accuracy, timeliness and clarity in financial reporting, a reduction in manual processes and fewer errors and omissions. The software has also enhanced ERM’s management reporting capabilities, enabling them to create a wider variety of reports at different levels of the organisation.

“This is part of our longer-term strategy to leverage SAP solutions across our operations,” says Walker.

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AT A GLANCE

• Environment Protection Authority Victoria

INDUSTRY

• Public sector-environmental protection

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

• Provide a single location for capturing and accessing client information.
• Streamline and improve decision-making.
• Provide public access to clients’ environmental performance records

SOLUTION

• SAP CRM, SAP Business-Objects, SAP Portal and Investigative Case Management, part of SAP Urban Matters.

THE BENEFITS

• Instant access to all client interactions.
• Better, more efficient decision-making.
• Platform for providing public online access to environmental performance information.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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

Environment Protection Authority Victoria has improved its decision-making by centralising client information and streamlining processes with a tidy CRM…

As evidence that Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria is doing a good job, seeing state capital Melbourne declared the world’s most liveable city three years in a row is pretty hard to argue with.

However, it wasn’t always that way, says authority strategy and support director Jason Borg. He says implementation of a customer relationship management system after a 2010 review of information practices has lifted EPA Victoria’s game.

And he acknowledges there’s more to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s city liveability ranking than EPA Victoria’s contribution. “The environment is just a small part of it,” he says. Nonetheless, Melbourne can feel pretty happy with the state of its atmosphere and waterways, for which EPA Victoria has statutory responsibility.

“We have very good air quality and our bay is quite clean for a city of four million people,” Borg says. “The iconic Yarra River, as muddy as it appears, is also in reasonable health – coming second in the International RiverPrize – a prestigious environmental award in 2011.”

Now, at least, the authority is equipped to do something about it. EPA Victoria issues licences for a range of environmental activities at 700 sites and has a regulatory role at several thousand other sites that have non-licence compliance obligations.

Information misfires
The authority’s 350 employees deal with 17,000 organisations and capture about 400,000 pieces of data. But before it adopted SAP CRM, EPA Victoria’s left hand often didn’t know what its right hand was doing.

“We were finding it was difficult to access our own information in our decision-making. This was either because we weren’t capturing the right information or our systems weren’t talking to each other,” Borg says.

The authority had numerous systems ranging from five to 20 years old, including bespoke applications and internally developed databases and spreadsheets. As a result it was difficult to see the process flow through the organisation. “That was a big part of the challenge. We just weren’t disciplined enough to capture information and the system wasn’t helping us to do that.”

Borg says some of the authority’s clients were happy to take advantage of the situation.

“Some companies might deal with us over several statutory instruments and we weren’t able to get an organisational view of our interactions with them. One part of the organisation could be unaware of the same regulated entity’s dealings with another part of the organisation.

“We found some less scrupulous clients would shop around for advice on what they had to do to comply with a licence — if they didn’t like one answer they might ring someone else in the team to ask their view.

“Our officers weren’t able to see what had already been discussed with the client because there was no central repository for us to record interactions.”

SAP CRM closes that loophole by assigning every client an account into which all activity is recorded.

“Now if we get a call from company X, we go into SAP and call up the company and we can see every contact it has had with anyone in the organisation, including what advice has been given to it.

“It means we have much more transparency internally about what we’re saying to the outside world. We have a single source of truth for each account.”

A natural fit
Data from nearly 60 business processes is captured in the CRM system. As the phased implementation has proceeded, legacy data has been cleansed and ported to the system.

Borg says when the organisation went to tender, it didn’t specify a CRM system. But because it was looking for a client-based system with everything revolving around the client account, a CRM was the logical platform.

“We laid out our requirements to our technology partner NTT DATA Business Solutions and they presented SAP CRM as the best fit for the model, demonstrating that it provided the best and most robust solution from a cost-benefit perspective. And confidence in the brand also persuaded us to go with it.”

“SAP CRM means we have much more transparency internally about what we’re saying to the outside world.”
Jason Borg, strategy and support director

Added bonuses
The implementation, undertaken by NTT DATA Business Solutions, comes under SAP’s Urban Matters programme, which applies the company’s technology to city management.

“An upside is greater community transparency, allowing the public to look online at licences, notices and so on. They couldn’t do that before because our systems were too messy.”

A business portal gives clients access to their information and a community portal is under development for publicly available information.

“We’re big on being as transparent as possible and SAP enables that. We’re trying to put the onus on clients to be responsible for their environmental performance, and by putting that information into the ether, people will be able to make their own assessment without us being the arbitrator.”

If that’s something new for the public to get used to, the system also demands change from EPA Victoria’s staff, Borg says, who have to be disciplined about recording client dealings.

“I’m careful not to paint too rosy a picture about the implementation because, although it’s been successful, it requires a lot of change-management. It’s not as intuitive as a bespoke system that you’ve been able to design for yourself.”

But the pay off is clear.

“The ability to follow processes across the organisation is a huge benefit. Historically there was no transparency between the start and end points of different processes, whereas now you can see all of that.

“We’re also collecting more information, although we’re yet to harness all the upside of that. That’s our next focus: using that information to generate good reports so you can make better decisions into the future.”

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Published on the 17/03/2014 | Written by SAP

AT A GLANCE

• George Weston Foods

INDUSTRY

• Agribusiness

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

• Improve grower registration
• Upgrade general administration and processing
• Better position reporting for grain procurement

SOLUTION

• SAP Global Trade Management (GTM)

THE BENEFITS

• A successful Australia industry-first deployment of the SAP Global Trade Management (GTM) system
• Standardised harvest contracts
• Back-office admin minimised
• Position reporting no more than 24 hours old
• Increased accuracy and time savings led to better harvest-time results

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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

In an industry first, an implementation of SAP Global Trade Management helped major food manufacturer George Weston Foods gain the visibility it required to manage its busy harvest period…

As one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest food manufacturers, employing around 8000 employees in around 60 sites, George Weston Foods (GWF) produces some of these countries’ best-known household bread and smallgoods brands, with other divisions including flour and milling, food service, and cakes and ingredients.

Following the global financial crisis, many large agri-sector players shifted their focus to risk management, and with the majority already using SAP for their back office functions, demand increased to expand the SAP footprint to address core business operational activities and functions unique to the industry.

The milling division of GWF identified three pain points to be addressed through a system upgrade – grower registration, general administration and processing, and position reporting for grain procurement. NTT DATA Business Solutions (formerly Extend Technologies) was engaged as the implementation partner on the project, and according to Brian Dickinson, business development manager for mining and agribusiness at NTT DATA Business Solutions, the initial business case revealed the need to undertake a two-stage project – which was labelled Project Novocain.

Implementation and challenges
The first phase of the project, was focused on fixing some of the problems in the milling division’s existing SAP environment, which had been installed more than a decade earlier.

This included adding front-end components such as the National Grower Registry interface, which provided a means to automate validation of grower registers and updating the SAP vendor master data with the grower details.

While the team hit some unexpected integration issues, the changes made in phase one were up and running in time for the harvest period that year – a critical and very busy time for the GWF milling business.

The team moved onto phase two, which involved removing the back-end legacy system, and replacing it with a more standard SAP engine in SAP Global Trade Management (GTM), an orchestration management solution.

While the solution has been widely used in the oil and gas industry, it had not been successfully implemented for commodities in Australia before.

“We decided to keep the solution to all standard SAP tools, so we built it with a Web Dynpro front end. This exists outside of the GTM solution, but still within SAP, and then orchestrates through GTM into the SAP back-end.

Ultimately, it looks like standard sales and distribution (SD) and material management (MM) contracts, but they are all done through the GTM engine,” Dickinson says.

The system allows around a dozen different grain procurement contract types to be captured, ranging from ‘track’ through to some grower-specific type contracts such as ‘hectare’ and ‘variety’. These, for example, allow buyers to contract growers for specific varieties and tonnages with an estimated yield factor, from which the total tonnage is calculated. The solution automatically generates the formatted contract in PDF and automatically forwards it to the relevant counter-party through the appropriate communications channel.

Another aspect of the implementation concerned the process of grain deliveries – or ‘tickets’, as they are known.

“The Australian market is fairly unique in the fact that it is not just tickets to their own mills, they are also receipted at third parties such as the bulk handlers,” Dickinson says. “The solution provides for a ticket upload program which processes external electronic files which accommodates all the major Australian bulk handlers and provides a mapping component for GWF to map their own formats and changes in the future.”

This includes a front-end error correction procedure.

“All tickets process through GTM and are automatically matched against the relevant contract. The transactions then flow through automatically to update inventories and process vendor payments based on the agreed contracted terms,” Dickinson says. “Likewise, when a contact is struck, the contract pricing is automatically populated, including all deductions, freight estimates and levies such that the ‘delivered to mill price’ is known at the time of writing the contract. We are also incorporating in the latest release unpriced contracts with pricing generated through an automatic feed from the Chicago Board of Trade.”

Another key component of the project was position reporting. For GWF, the harvest period – from October to January each year – is a crucial period, as it receives the majority of deliveries during this time.

“Depending on their purchasing strategy, they may have decided going into the harvest that they would purchase 50 percent of their stock through contracts, and maybe the other 50 percent would be purchased through the spot market. So they need to know what their position is – what their demand is, what they currently have contracted, what they have delivered and what their exposures are, so their position reporting becomes absolutely critical,” says Dickinson.

Previously, because the administration was largely manual, simple things like pricing changes to tickets, such as updated storage and handling charges would have to be manually looked up, calculated and re-entered. The manual processing was causing a significant backlog in ticket processing during the harvest, resulting in the position report being several weeks out of date – meaning they were essentially flying blind.

“Now all those pricing conditions are set up and automatically applied, including changes, so there is minimal to no administration required to process all those tickets,” Dickinson says.

From a reporting perspective, the data is now fed into SAP Business Warehouse, and the position report is created using Portal and some Business Explorer reports. These improvements mean that the position report now accurately indicates their procurement position and at most is 24 hours behind.

With phase two of the project kicking off in April, the team faced a challenging timeline to have the system ready to go live for the harvest period beginning in October. In addition to these tight timeframes, the company was also undergoing a number of other changes concurrently, therefore requiring very hands-on management to implement a brand-new solution on time.

Dickinson attributes a large part of the project’s success to the Steering Committee, led by executive sponsor Hugh Robertson.

“The Steering Committee was certainly empowered very well, a credit to the GWF management” Dickinson says.

Business benefits
Among the critical success factors for Project Novocain was having contracts standardised ready for the harvest. By formalising their business rules and terms and conditions through these contracts, some of the discretionary elements would be removed from buying negotiations, resulting in more consistent contracts across the business.

Another was being able to minimise the number of back office administration staff required, which automation of previously manual processes delivered. And just how essential having up-to-date information on procurement is for a business like GWF was demonstrated during the project itself, according to Dickinson, when commodity prices shifted $60-80 overnight.

“That change is significant, and represents tens of millions of dollars for an organisation such as GWF, hence the why position reporting is so critical,” he says.

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AT A GLANCE

• SuperCheap Auto Group

INDUSTRY

• Retail

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

• A strategic ERP system that could cope with aggressive expansion plans

SOLUTION

• SAP ERP Retail
• Professional services provided by NTT DATA Business Solutions (formerly Extend Technologies)

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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

When the mega retailer needed to achieve its growth plans, management realised it needed to shift a gear in order to cater for its aggressive expansion plans…

SuperCheap Auto is Australasia’s leading retailer of automotive and boating, camping and fishing products, with 300-plus stores and 4000-plus employees. Its brands include SuperCheap Auto, BCF-Boating, Camping and Fishing, and Goldcross Cycles. When SuperCheap Auto’s (SCA) management realised in 2008 that the company had outgrown its legacy systems,it went to market to source a strategic ERP. At the time of the evaluation, SCA was a sub $200 million business trading only in the eastern seaboard. In this context, it did not specifically need a tier 1 solution. However, management had aggressive expansion plans for the existing brand and for additional brands as well as geographic expansion. This drove them to select, SAP Retail, a strategic ERP system that would provide them with the flexibility to grow channels to market and expand into new geographies without IT constraint. The project involved implementing SAP Retail with these strategic initiatives in mind.

Other projects
NTT DATA Business Solutions, is SuperCheap Auto’s IT partner and has alreadyworked with the company ona number of projects including the acquisition of South Australia/Western Australia-based retailer; expansion into New Zealand (introduction of multi-company, multi-currency); a BI implementation; the acquisition of Camp Mart (re-launched as BCF); Project FOSIL (Focus On Supply, Inventory and Logistics) SuperCheap Auto’s supply chain improvement project; the SAP MDM (Master Data Management) implementation; the SAP XI (PI) Implementation (integration to WMI warehouse management); the SAP ERP 2005 upgrade; and the implementation of a mail order business.

Key challenges
The SAP ERP Retail implementation project provided a number of challenges for the team and NTT DATA Business Solutions. Firstly, SCA has an in-house developed POS that was redeveloped as a separate parallel project using .NET Framework and enhanced to read and write SAP formatted output (i.e. Idocs).

Secondly, during the initial implementation of SAP Retail, supply chain management software maker Manhattan Associates was doing an upgrade to its Warehouse Management Integration (WMI) so NTT DATA Business Solutionshad to integrate with WMI while the upgrade was occurring.

The system also had to deal with:

• Automotive aftermarket retail company
• Multiple brands/banners
• Operating in Australia and New Zealand
• Large data volumes
• Large, complex BI implementation

Timeline
The project was broken into three phases, with the blueprint phase lasting 10 weeks, the realisation phase lasting 20 weeks and the final preparation and go-live taking six weeks.

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

AT A GLANCE

• Queensland Nickel Pty Ltd

INDUSTRY

• Mining & Resources

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

• Replace existing ERP, infrastructure and user systems in tight timeframe with no opportunity for an extension
• Migrate from a multinational integrated shared service operation to a standalone business

SOLUTION

• SAP’s ECC6 Business Suite
• Professional services provided by NTT DATA Business Solutions

THE BENEFITS

• An integrated foundation platform to enable growth
• Delivered on time and under budget with no impact to business-as-usual operations
• New Business Warehouse and BusinessObjects capabilities

FOR MORE INFORMATION

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

Queensland Nickel operates the Yabulu Refinery north of Townsville in Queensland, and processes high-quality nickel and cobalt from third party mines in New Caledonia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Previously part of the BHP Billiton group, Queensland Nickel was sold in July 2009 to companies owned by Professor Clive Palmer. Queensland Nickel had operated in an SAP environment for some years, and was moved into the BHP Billiton global SAP environment two and a half years before the sale.

The newly-sold company an effectively standalone organisation one month after the transaction date, but as this would not provide enough time to transition the SAP system, Queensland Nickel negotiated a transition agreement enabling it to operate for six months on the BHP system. The deadline for Queensland Nickel to be operating independently was set for 31 December 2009.

Queensland Nickel chief financial officer Basil Ahyick says the company had to make a decision about replacing the full ERP system. “The objectives for that decision were the amount of time we had to transition to a new system; the operational stability, as the plant had to be humming and running at capacity as we came out of the previous system; and setting up a good foundation for the future in terms of how we would translate and interpret our business information.”

As a resources company in the complex minerals processing industry, Queensland Nickel had some particular technical challenges. “We are similar to a manufacturing facility, so we have quite complex processes for transforming ore to metal. Our ability to continue to translate the production information into business support and financial information in a timely manner is critical. It is a continual challenge to marry our ERP with our process control information and to continually provide updated targets and operational data back to the operation, and to translate that information into key performance indicators that is available to the whole operation,” Ahyick says.

A deadline’s a deadline
There was an immovable deadline for the project. Queensland Nickel would have no access to the BHP Billiton systems after 31 December 2009. This brought the Go-Live date back to 30 November, resulting in a four-month timeline.

“We targeted very specific SAP resources that we knew had worked with the BHP Billiton group before, or had worked on our previous implementation of the global SAP system in BHP, so we didn’t have a learning curve in our business,” Ahyick says. “We pulled a team together very rapidly and obviously we took an approach of ‘vanilla’ SAP. We were not going to customise unless it was absolutely necessary, and we needed to look at how varied we were in our processes from the vanilla SAP world.”

NTT DATA Business Solutions (formerly Extend Technologies) came on board as a strategic partner with independent consultants to assist with various aspects of the SAP project.

From an SAP perspective, the key objective was to implement a contemporary version of the system. While there was some discussion about whether Queensland Nickel’s new SAP system should essentially duplicate what they had operated at BHP Billiton, the team instead opted for SAP’s ECC6 Business Suite, which included functionality for managing finance, supply, maintenance, sales and marketing, payroll and HR. The business also chose to implement SAP Xi for integration and SAP’s BusinessObjects reporting suite for advanced business reporting.

“As a result of that, our ABAP [SAP programming] work was quite limited, and it was mainly around some reporting. Nearly all the process work was very straightforward in all the systems, because we had a broad coverage of SAP previously,” Ahyick says.

The HR element
NTT DATA Business Solutions’ SAP Qualified HCM payroll solution template was used as the starting point for the HR/Payroll implementation and helped to accelerate the process, as well as reducing overheads for support and upgrades. The SAP HCM modules that were included within project scope included:

• Personnel administration
• Organisational management
• Time management (including cross application timesheet)
• Payroll
• Employee self service
• Manager self service

The HCM Payroll solution covered 800 employees with a combination of salaried and waged (EBA) groups across monthly and fortnightly payroll frequencies.

The NTT DATA Business Solutions HCM payroll solution template was applied to Queensland Nickel’s consolidated ECC6 system in mid August which provided a time frame of three months to complete system configuration from the template base-line, unit, integration and user acceptance testing, data migration and finally training delivery in order to meet the go-live deadline of 30 November. The implementation adhered to the overall project approach of ‘vanilla’ SAP with no customisation.

In addition to the core HCM Payroll modules, workflow was implemented to support leave and time-sheet approvals through employee and manager self-service. HCM roles and system authorisations ‘with context’ were also implemented, providing a robust structural authorisation for HR data and a workflow solution that leveraged Queensland Nickel’s HR organisational structure, within SAP.

Ready for go-live
All HCM modules went live successfully on 1 December 2009. The first fortnightly payroll was processed on 9th December and the first monthly payroll on 11th December. Both payrolls had been fully reconciled and balanced in SAP well in advance of their process day to ensure all employees were paid correctly and on time.

The SAP project obviously had interdependencies with other streams that were running. Open communication was absolutely critical to making sure that on a daily basis any of the latest potential impact points were managed and resolved. Despite the high-pressure situation, the project was delivered on time and on a tight budget. This was due to some very tight controls of the project, according to Ahyick.

“It was full on. We had to bring in the right team, we had very strong management support behind the project, and made sure that we had a very rigid time frame and we had full back-end failsafe where we needed to. It required rapid decision making and very few customisations unless they were justified,” Ahyick says.

‘No surprises’
From the partners’ perspective, with no margin for error, the project team had to be able hit the ground running across a very broad project scope.

“The challenge was really to pull together a team that absolutely knew the industry, so it could sit down with the business specialists from Queensland Nickel and speak the same business language from day one,” says Tony Parvin, who manged the entire SAP project.

With such a tight timeframe for the project, the team couldn’t afford to be held up at any point, so adopted some approaches specifically to keep things moving along as quickly as possible. From July, all the work was done onsite, so the team largely lived in rented apartments in Townsville and worked at the refinery.

Steering committee meetings with the executive of Queensland Nickel were held every fortnight, and this strong executive support and availability was key to keeping the project on track and achieving its objectives. With a project slogan of ‘no surprises’, an open project room helped ensure everything was on the table.

“Basically the entire team of business specialists and SAP specialists were in a big open area, along with myself and the programme manager. We talked across the desks, the protocol and etiquette was good. From day one it was absolutely about open communication. There was no time to convene meetings to deal with issues, they had to be dealt with on the run, so it was very quick decision making involving all the relevant parties,” Tony Parvin says. “We really had an absolutely fantastic team of people from both the business and obviously the SAP consultants. It was an absolutely superb effort from all.”

The hardest part
Working on tight deadlines wasn’t without its problems, however. “Fatigue wasn’t an issue, as we managed that very well. But just running at a high intensity for a very short period of time meant you had to manage different personalities and different views all the time,” Ahyick says. He adds that probably the most difficult obstacle from the business’s perspective was ensuring BHP Billiton was able to keep up with the pace of the work the project team was doing.

There were also issues relating to the very strict protocols BHP Billiton has in place around its information management processes, according to Parvin. “It did present some communication challenges. But we had a very competent team involved in data migration and the senior consultants themselves took a very active role,” he says.

From a technical perspective, however, the biggest problem arose with faxing. “It only lasted a few days, but it’s a bit ironic that the technology that has been around for 30 years actually presented us with some significant technical challenges,” Parvin says.

Perfect launch, ongoing benefits
Not only was the project finished on time, there was a window of opportunity to ensure the payroll and accounts payable was working seamlessly before go-live.

“We could have gone fully live first off, and done the big bang approach. But we were able to run three interim payroll runs to make sure we were on track and we were able to make sure accounts payable was up and running and working as well,” Ahyick says. With the full transfer of data completed ahead of time, the go-live went incredibly smoothly. “The operation didn’t really miss a heartbeat overall, which was fantastic. When we ran live, on the day we cut over, there were no problems. You expect maybe some purchase orders or maintenance requests that don’t get through, but everything just went like clockwork,” Ahyick says.

In terms of benefits for the business, in addition to providing a strong, stable platform for Queensland Nickel to move forward, it also now has Business Warehouse and BusinessObjects capability, which it did not have under the previous ownership. Ahyick says this new functionality supports the company’s approach to business improvement, which translate into KPIs across the organisation.

“It provides us with an awesome foundation because we have very wide coverage of SAP components now. Our full integration of product is giving us an excellent ability to go to the next stage. So the information capability and the translation of our production data into information to feed our business improvement process, is going to be the key that we can now further develop and move forward with.”

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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.”

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