InfraBuild, a large metals recycler and steelmaker, has set a target end state to have all its operations running on RISE with SAP S/4HANA in AWS for enterprise resource planning.
Image credit: InfraBuild
The company took five months this year to move from a board paper seeking funding to its go-live with RISE, and worked with both SAP and Capgemini on the project.
Head of IT Ian Harvison told an SAP summit in Melbourne that there were two “catalysts” for the move: a desire to move off legacy ERP systems, both SAP and non-SAP, and to start using new features such as AI, which are only accessible to customers on newer versions of SAP.
Part of the organisation already used SAP S/4HANA, and the first stage of moving to RISE was effectively a re-platforming of that environment.
“Our project was fundamentally a technical migration,” Harvison said.
“Basically, for the core platform, we’ve just taken the existing S/4 on HANA environment and moved that from on-prem on Azure to RISE with AWS”.
This appears to be a not-uncommon upgrade path, moving from a self-hosted and run S/4HANA environment to one where SAP manages the infrastructure, software implementation and updates.
The company still had to make some upgrades to its core to facilitate the transition.
“There were three core components that we actually couldn’t migrate [to RISE] because there’s new technology from SAP that we had to move to,” Harvison said.
“For example, we were using the [on-premises] Closing Cockpit [for period-end management in finance], so the new solution is the Advanced Financial Closing (AFC).
“OpenText is our document scanning and VIM [vendor invoice management] solution that we had to migrate as well to a new platform.”
The company also had to upgrade the way events are triggered for transport management
“[For] those three components, we actually had to move to new versions,” Harvison said.
With RISE live, the parts of the business that already used S/4HANA can now pursue use cases for newer AI-enabled features.
“For the divisions that are actually already in S/4HANA on RISE, we can actually start leveraging some of the AI capability so that they can keep innovating and they don’t lose that first advantage position that they had [in the organisation],” Harvison said.
Other next steps are to bring more parts of the organisation into the RISE environment.
“We’ve got two of our business units on [a] legacy [Oracle] JD Edwards environment,” Harvison said.
“Our ERP roadmap is that we’re kicking off a review of the JD Edwards part of our business and we’ll look to actually move them onto S/4HANA on RISE.
“After that, we’ll start to look at our two other business units that are running on SAP ECC 6.0 and migrate them as well.
“So we’re prioritising trying to get rid of the more complex technology debt, and then tackling the SAP one after that”.
Mainstream support for ECC 6.0 ends in 2027. Extended support options are possible through to the end of 2030, but this has set a timeline for organisations to move to a newer S/4HANA environment.