Managed Cloud Services | Arla | Case Study | Bluestonex

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Arla Cloud Case Study

ARLAIntroduction to the client

Arla Foods UK Limited is a major dairy products company in the United Kingdom, based in Leeds, and a subsidiary of the Swedish-Danish Arla Foods Group.

Arla had migrated all their SAP company codes from a recently acquired business in the UK to their single SAP instance. The UK SAP instance was now ‘legacy’ and so began our journey. Our approach was one of discovery using design thinking techniques on our way to the journey to the cloud.

ABusiness Challenge(s)

Our insight into sun setting SAP & non-SAP legacy systems is slightly different to that of other consultancies & their traditional archiving projects. Because of the dilemma of legacy applications & its complexity, our methodology has a more simplistic approach. From our insight, we see the following challenges with regards to retiring legacy application:

• Many businesses are experiencing a huge growth in business information.
• Legacy and Enterprise Applications are bursting with different forms of information.
• A lot of businesses do not have a sun setting strategy and if they do it is complex and costly.
• Enterprises are spending millions of €' each year to maintain legacy applications and resource to support the applications because of;

o Data growth and retention
- Spending €' to maintain solely for data
- Legislation on data

o People and Skill
- Scarce resources needed to maintain legacy systems

o Risk and Capability
- Risk hitting IT departments
- at a time of cost cutting
- IT departments stretched

o Cost and Control
- Too many legacy systems across multiple environments
- Strain on management


ASolution Overview

The project consisted of the following phases which Bluestonex managed:

1. Discovery
2. Value Proposition
3. Detailed Planning
4. Execution
5. Manage
6. Run

After the discovery and a detailed value case phase, Bluestonex recommended the move to cloud.

Obviously at the end of the migration project, certain data objects would need to be retained for many years making it far more cost effective to move the ECC6 environment in totality to the cloud, rather than follow a traditional archiving method where time, effort and cost were far greater in establishing all data objects to be retained for legal and business purposes. We reviewed the landscape and dropped many sub systems (APO, BW as examples) and kept the core ERP and content server as critical in the retention of key data.

Bluestonex moved the whole dataset from the legacy SAP ERP & its associated Content Server to allocated storage on Microsoft Azure. We worked in conjunction with a cloud partner to make the transition easier. The process involved exporting the databases from the datacenter, building the cloud environment, importing (export files) into the cloud and testing.

Once completed, the system was then ‘switched off’ until such a time data was needed by the business or from auditors from a compliance perspective.

The target system was scaled for a small number of users and had limitations such as ‘read only’ as the database was no longer productive & also printing but the entire set of data objects was available to users if requested.

Bluestonex then removed the services provided by the previous on premise hosting Center and ensured destruction of data and physical kit in the appropriate manner.

The data will be held in the cloud provider for a minimum of 7 years (Financial & HR Payroll data).

AKey Solution Benefit(s)

The savings with this solution was a 98% reduction in ‘revenue cost’ and capex cost was far more cost effective compared to traditional archiving programmes or even on premise solutions.

Running costs can now be managed and the legacy system switched on as and when needed.

BSXCollaboration with Bluestonex Consulting

Bluestonex are a design thinking SAP consultancy that focus on User Experience and Innovation. Our core technology focus is ECC & S/4 HANA but a strong emphasis on UI’s and simplification using tools such as SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas. Our Design Thinking & Innovation practice have driven the most value from SAP technologies and now our innovation labs create new SAP software products such as Maextro (SAP Master Data and Process Management Solution)

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