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Enabling Global Business Transformation Initiatives for a Materials and Aggregates Company

Synopsis

Growing complexity of local and regional SAP landscapes, and distributed operations need the capabilities of an enabler who can provide greater control over SAP systems at multiple locations and synchronize their highly decentralized operations. The client, a global building materials and aggregates company, keen on faster growth, partnered with us for our ability to provide new ideas. We successfully provided greater control and visibility into processes, and were able to support the client’s continued growth and expansion plans. We also offered catalog-based services in the countries in which the client operated.

About the Client

A global building materials and aggregates company, the client has a presence in over 70 countries with 400 manufacturing plants. The client deals in cement, clinker, concrete, lime, and aggregates.

Business Challenge

Over the years, the client’s rapid organic growth to expand geographical reach led to relatively decentralized operations. With a global presence in over 70 countries, deep fragmentation of the client’s business structure manifested in its IT systems—there was no harmonization or centralization of processes, poor visibility into processes, and no control over the systems. Due to this highly complex IT landscape, the client ran up high personnel, infrastructure, and administrative costs, and struggled with coordination between geographies.

To realize their vision of much more for much less, the client was looking for experienced and dependable partners who could combine global reach with strong expertise in SAP implementation and the ability to deliver at optimal cost. Soundly equipped with rich experience in similar large-scale global SAP engagements, the client selected Coforge as a strategic partner for delivering with certainty

Our Solution

Our partnership with the client spanned nine countries: The Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and India. We understood the strategic need of their vision and carried out a comprehensive analysis of their business processes and ERP implementation in all 70 locations. We used IBM DS, IBM X/P, SUN, HPUX storage systems, end-to-end SAP Portfolio Custom Applications Oracle/SQL database, international multimedia links, Symantec SIM as the security operations center, and VMware as its private cloud.

For simplifying the IT landscape and processes, we carried out the following:

Country-wise end-to-end SAP service management IT infrastructure management Application production support End-user computing for more than 10,000 devices in 400 locations ERP hosting services 24X7 multi-lingual support Messaging and collaboration

By leveraging the continuous delivery model, we delivered successfully in this global engagement. The peak size of the number of named SAP users during the engagement was more than 15,000 and number of concurrent users was more than 5000.

Post implementation, our team of professionals was deployed to provide support for future implementations.

Delivering More Value

In countries where we did implementations, the client’s operations have benefited in several ways, including:

More Support: We provided 24X7 multi-lingual technical support and network expertise. More Performance: We managed more than 17,000 devices including network equipment, and assets with an uptime of 99.99%. More Improvements: Our team handled an average 8000 tickets per month with SLA achievement of 99%. More than 525 locations and 10,500 users were supported across India with SLA of 99%. End-to-end SLAs improved from 99% to 99.7%.

More Adaptability: The client moved from Capex to Opex model enabling faster business growth. More Savings: Personnel and infrastructure costs of support and helpdesk operations were reduced. Administrative costs were also reduced by consolidating regional data centers and sharing disaster recovery facilities across countries in the region. More Intuitiveness: End-users could now build workstation-based solutions.

More Simplicity: Production and supply-chain coordination were made easier across plants and region. More Efficiency: Integrated end-user computing improved operational efficiency.
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