The Finnish fam­i­ly busi­ness Trans­meri Group, spe­cial­iz­ing in man­u­fac­tur­ing, import­ing and whole­sal­ing and the fam­i­ly-owned com­pa­ny ISLET Group spe­cial­iz­ing in tech­nol­o­gy con­sult­ing have start­ed the S/4HANA inno­va­tion project at the begin­ning of May 2019. In the “Proof of Con­cept” (POC) ‑project Transmeri’s cur­rent SAP ERP sys­tem will be con­vert­ed to SAP S/4HANA, SAP’s lat­est ERP tech­nol­o­gy. The project is of par­tic­u­lar inter­est since S/4HANA con­ver­sion is done on the Microsoft cloud plat­form Azure.

Trans­meri and Islet do the inno­va­tion project among the first com­pa­nies in Europe. In the POC project, Transmeri’s test envi­ron­ment is copied to Microsoft Azure, the sys­tem is con­vert­ed accord­ing to the Uni­ver­sal Char­ac­ter Set (Uni­code), after which the sys­tem is updat­ed to S/4HANA.

“We want­ed to pro­vide our busi­ness with the expe­ri­ence of S/4HANA using our own process­es and data and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to get to know S/4HANA in the fore­front. In addi­tion, I want to get a real­is­tic under­stand­ing of Azure’s per­for­mance as a plat­form for SAP S/4HANA, there­by con­firm­ing that Azure could be one of our plat­form alter­na­tives when con­vert­ing to S/4HANA. Since S/4HANA requires more capac­i­ty from its plat­form than pre­vi­ous SAP ERP, the sim­u­la­tion of future main­te­nance costs and their opti­miza­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties in the long run are also of inter­est in this project,” says Kim­mo Koho, CIO at Trans­meri Group.

PROJECT EXE­CU­TION

Total of six weeks has been allo­cat­ed to project exe­cu­tion, after which Trans­meri will be able to access its pro­duc­tion-like SAP S/4HANA envi­ron­ment. Transmeri’s project has start­ed off fast. SAP HANA plat­form ser­vices pro­vi­sion­ing to Microsoft Azure has been swift. Azure envi­ron­ment set-up, cur­rent test envi­ron­ment copy to Azure as well as uni­code con­ver­sion and tech­ni­cal test­ing of the source envi­ron­ment were car­ried out with­in two weeks. Usu­al­ly, some months may be required sole­ly to pro­vi­sion the plat­form environment.

“ISLET’s POC approach is a quick and cost-effec­tive start­ing point for S/4HANA. It enables a prag­mat­ic way of test­ing S/4HANA con­ver­sion and pro­vides a good basis for real­is­tic sched­ule, cost and resource plans for a suc­cess­ful project. We at ISLET make sure that the imple­men­ta­tion of S/4HANA and Azure takes place with­out sig­nif­i­cant work­load on the cus­tomer’s own resources. At the moment prepara­to­ry mea­sures for finance and logis­tics are under­way and the sys­tem con­ver­sion will take place in the com­ing days,” says Juk­ka Pent­ti­nen Chief Busi­ness Offi­cer at ISLET and Project Lead of Trans­mer­i’s POC project.

SAP and Microsoft are also sup­port­ing the project. Com­pa­nies have been work­ing close­ly togeth­er in recent years to pro­vide Microsoft Azure plat­form ser­vices for SAP S/4HANA. The POC project of Trans­meri and ISLET is among the first in Europe to con­vert S/4HANA to Microsoft Azure.

NEW ENVI­RON­MENT CRE­ATES NEW OPPORTUNITIES

“ISLET’s S/4HANA migra­tion path offer­ing pro­vides a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­pel any fears relat­ed to heavy S/4HANA upgrades. It allows SAP cus­tomers to see what S/4HANA looks like with their own process­es and data. In addi­tion, the top­ic is impor­tant and time­ly, as the offi­cial sup­port for the cur­rent SAP ERP ver­sion ends at the end of 2025. With S/4HANA con­ver­sion, cus­tomers can move to the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy with a faster sched­ule and more agile project imple­men­ta­tion,” says Arto Saari­nen, Head of Chan­nel from SAP Finland.

Oper­at­ing SAP S/4HANA envi­ron­ment from Microsoft Azure in the form of a POC project enables orga­ni­za­tions to do var­i­ous things, such as test­ing the per­for­mance of Microsoft Azure as a plat­form for S/4HANA, uti­liz­ing a scal­able pub­lic cloud ser­vice and enabling a rapid project launch. In addi­tion, the num­ber of test con­ver­sion cycles in the con­ver­sion of the pro­duc­tion sys­tem to S/4HANA is reduced, so the POC project is also a step clos­er to the imple­men­ta­tion project itself.

“Microsoft is a com­pet­i­tive and flex­i­bly scal­able option for S/4HANA plat­form ser­vices. I rec­om­mend that orga­ni­za­tions plan­ning to migrate to S/4HANA include Microsoft Azure as one of the plat­form alter­na­tives. If the plat­form for SAP ERP is now in the so-called pri­vate cloud or in the clien­t’s own dat­a­cen­ters, Azure brings con­sid­er­able agili­ty to the chang­ing plat­form needs and enables var­i­ous quick exper­i­ments on the SAP HANA data­base. Azure’s offer­ing is out­stand­ing­ly wide rang­ing from small vir­tu­al machines to the largest HANA large instance machines in the mar­ket offer­ing also the most com­pre­hen­sive SAP cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for dif­fer­ent vir­tu­al machine con­fig­u­ra­tions. It has been a plea­sure to col­lab­o­rate with Islet in the Trans­meri POC project,” says Jarkko Lainio, respon­si­ble for part­ner busi­ness devel­op­ment at Microsoft.

Trans­meri is a Finnish fam­i­ly-owned com­pa­ny with a long tra­di­tion of import­ing, mar­ket­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing dai­ly con­sumer goods and cos­met­ics. Total turnover of Trans­meri Group was 187.1 MEUR in 2016 and the com­pa­ny employs 534 peo­ple in total. The cor­po­ra­tion includes importer and mar­keter Oy Trans­meri Ab, con­tract man­u­fac­tur­er Trans­meri Logis­tics as well as Ban­mark, Sul­tra­de, Mirac­u­lous and Kaupmees.

Jan­i­na Luoto
CEO, Isletter
janina.​luoto@​isletgroup.​fi
+358 40 574 1266

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