Orica re-platforms its SAP from Azure to Google Cloud

ASX-listed Orica has changed the cloud ecosystem it uses to host its SAP environment from Azure to Google Cloud, chasing performance improvements, cost savings and a greater ability to tap AI.

Speaking at Google Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas early this morning, group CIO Rachael Sandel said the decision to switch hyperscalers was made in “early 2024” following a “detailed review” of the company’s SAP infrastructure.

Orica has a long history on SAP. Notably, it made the move from ECC 6.0 to a ‘greenfields’ S/4 HANA build in 2020 under a large-scale program known as 4S.

Sandel said the initial decision to host its S/4 HANA environment on Azure was “based on cost, security and innovation [reasons]” as well as an assessment of “what is the best cloud for that workload”.

However, the company started to review this “heading into 2024”, initially coinciding with the pending renewal of some of its multi-year commitments to Azure resources, known as reservations in Azure parlance.

“A number of our Azure reservations were coming up for renewal, although as with a lot of people, as the environment had grown over time, we had a number of staggered reservations so there’s never really a good time to review this in its entirety,” Sandel noted.

“But we had an opportunity to look at it, and infrastructure had changed quite a lot over that period.”

The company was also experiencing some pressing performance issues with its SAP environment and had exhausted its optimisation options with the software maker.

“The year before, we had upgraded our S/4 HANA to version [20]22 and we had performance-related issues in a number of reports and jobs,” Sandel said.

“We’d done everything we could on the application layer, so now we wanted to look more at the infrastructure and operating system layers.”

Orica had also run into a support issue: when Microsoft stopped offering premier support, the company elected to pay a third-party to provide equivalent services.

“Unfortunately when we really needed this support, it wasn’t available to us,” Sandel said.

The company also saw an opportunity to improve backup and recovery times for the SAP environment, which had blown out to between six and 16 hours, and to align to a cloud ecosystem that would let it run advanced analytics on SAP data.

“We had this single data source that our organisation had consolidated on, but we hadn’t been able to exploit the advantages around data and analytics related to SAP,” Sandel said.

The combination of these factors ultimately led Orica to decide to re-platform the SAP environment to back onto Google Cloud instead.

“From a business perspective, this was an ‘under the hood’ move,” Sandel said of the way the re-platforming was positioned internally.

“I said to the business, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not going to notice anything’. But what we did in the background was really make sure that we were testing and making sure that the performance is improving for our end users.”

Orica is the first organisation in Asia Pacific to move an S/4 HANA environment off Azure and onto Google Cloud.

This was completed in “83 working days” by Orica’s internal teams, Google Cloud Consulting, and a mix of partners including Accenture, LTIMindtree and Cognizant.

The re-platforming included standardisation on cloud instances running Linux, whereas previously the environment had a “blend” of server operating systems in the background.

Sandel said that the migration was accompanied by significant learning and upskilling of Orica’s team, given the ecosystem switch.

“We also took this as an opportunity to simplify, modernise and rightsize our environment,” she said.

That reduced some of the administrative overhead and contributed to cost reductions achieved so far.

“We’ve been able to make sustainable savings ongoing through rightsizing and through the relationship with Google Cloud,” she said.

Sandel noted that “not everything” was able to be migrated, nor did it make sense to do so.

“You need to review every single application and integration and cost, alongside the risk and technical limitations with the timeline you have available to you,” she said.

The company has seen significant performance improvements with key workloads: one job that had previously had to be run on weekends due to its resource intensiveness has seen a 50 percent improvement.

Performance has also improved on SAP Fiori apps and on S/4 HANA core response times, Sandel said.

Performing a backup of the SAP environment has reduced from the six to 16 hours timeframe to 20 minutes, and – although early days – the ability and results from applying AI and advanced analytics to its SAP data are promising, according to Sandel.

“We’ve now integrated Google’s AI platform and combined this to inform an intelligent data warehouse, and we’re starting to see some really promising results,” she said.

“I’ll just share one example where we’ve brought AI to our data across our supply chain to improve demand planning.”

“With just our SAP data and our SAP actuals, we’ve been able to train our own custom AI models and it’s given us the ability to forecast our customers’ demand for our products.”

The work is so far confined to Orica’s North American operations, but there are plans to broaden it worldwide.

“We’ve developed our own AI model, leveraging 50,000 machine learning models to predict the demand for every possible SKU [product] combination,” Sandel said.

“To date, we’ve been able to achieve 10 percent better sales forecast accuracy which is fantastic, and this will mean fewer missed revenue opportunities and better trade working capital. 

“This is just one example around using AI on SAP data and generating real value for the organisation.”

Ry Crozier is attending Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas as a guest of Google Cloud.