Client
The client is a multinational information technology and outsourcing company headquartered in India and USA. They deliver digital transformation and technology services from ideation to execution, enabling Global 2000 clients to outperform the competition.
The Challenges
The client was struggling with the reality that their servers had reached the end of their life. Facing the tough decision to choose between On Premise or Cloud, they ultimately decided to go with Azure, given the client’s impeccable working relationship with Microsoft. Although the efforts to ensure a smooth transition had started much earlier, the ongoing situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic made the task much more difficult. Moreover, other factors contributed to the nature of the challenge:
- System build of 7+ servers per landscape
- Unicode Conversion Integration of C Projects to S4-HANA -PPM
- BW to BW-HANA Migration
- High availability set up (S/4, Portal)
- Azure Cloud Migration in One Program
Solution
The client had been on legacy processes for more than 15 years and the time to re-engineer had finally arrived. One of the key decisions involved was to re-platform the core, and for this the choice that most resembled the client’s earlier setup was the S4HANA digital core. To aid their decision making, SAP conducted multiple workshops to showcase benefits and various external partners highlighted the need for it. A visit to SAP Waldorf made the product roadmap exceptionally clear, as well as any components used. Following this visit, the SAP Practice Team was chosen as implementation partners. While their business teams continued to use On-premise systems during the entire project phase (till production cutover), a Parallel Azure landscape was built for this project. This helped with multiple processes, such as:
- Non Unicode to Unicode Conversion, S/4 HANA system conversion, C projects integration with S/4 HANA PPM, Integration with third party applications, data migration, BW-HANA, Portal, Fiori upgrade
- Mocks, Dev, Quality systems which were used for SIT, UAT, training
- Multiple Mock builds to capture learnings, assess impact of integration of C projects with S-4 HANA PPM, review production downtime requirements, simulate production infra, data migration, cleanse master data
This landscape was then activated as BAU production and the On-premise landscape was shut down. The production cutover plan was fine-tuned with learnings from Mocks, COE, VAS service inputs. Moreover, it was performed 100% remotely due to the situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, even with a peak team size of 50+ consultants.
By ensuring a smooth S/4 Conversion and Azure Migration, the client was able to deliver: Single S/4 HANA Landscape for S/4 HANA and PPM, reduction in DB Size by 35%, flexibility and scalability due to Cloud, and benefits of performance in transaction and reporting due to HANA.
Customer Testimonial
"In today’s challenging, unprecedented market conditions, organizations’ short- and long-term goals are defined by their ability to respond proactively. With SAP S/4HANA as the digital core, Mindtree can adapt to evolving market conditions in real-time, improve collaboration, and drive innovation. The SAP Services and Support team worked closely with Mindtree to ensure that the project delivers valuable outcomes through implementation and support services, ranging from architecture advisory to Go Live support throughout the lifecycle of the project."
Rajesh Musaliyath, Services COO, SAP APJ
Read SAP's Case Study: How can a Future-ready IT Platform in the Cloud Enable Rapid Scalability and Deeper Insights?
