ArcelorMittal South Africa, the largest steel producer in Africa, with a production capacity of 6,1-million tonnes of liquid steel per annum, has successfully migrated to Dimension Data’s Cloud for SAP.
The company first sought to integrate their business strategy with cloud solutions in 2015, intending to move their SAP workloads off their own data centre into a cloud services provider which could also supply an SAP managed service on these SAP applications.
To start the journey with due diligence, the company issued a formal Request for Proposal in June of that year and Britehouse, a division of Dimension Data, was first selected as a Proof of Concept partner before being awarded both the migration and cloud platform contracts.
Chris Dippenaar, director of cloud services for SAP at Britehouse, comments: “As a global strategic partner to SAP, Dimension Data has the internal skills and expertise, a dedicated team who is willing to go the extra mile for customer-centric delivery, an excellent track record for delivery, as well as the first reference site in Africa, to expertly and effectively implement, manage, and support Cloud Services for SAP to ArcelorMittal South Africa. These were all major factors when they were in the process of considering partnering with Britehouse.”
Britehouse has worked with ArcelorMittal South Africa for close to 10 years, starting with a SAP landscape consolidation project in 2009. While the cost of the migration, as well as the cost of the cloud platform was seen as a major hurdle, the two parties negotiated to reduce their initial scope and Britehouse provided alternative solutions that would help ArcelorMittal meet its cloud-based objectives. The two were able to develop a plan that would ensure the success of the migration journey.
The migration to Dimension Data Cloud for SAP was successfully concluded in August 2017 and, at the end of August, the first month-end was processed on the new compute platform.
This positions ArcelorMittal well to move all SAP workloads to HANA, S4/HANA, and eventually S4/HANA Public Cloud, going forward.
Benefits have already been felt, including a sizable cost reduction due to converting a capex expense into an opex expense, not having to refresh hardware, a decreased cost of reliance on expensive SAP resources, fewer costs on procuring hardware required for a project, and more.
ArcelorMittal South Africa also experienced fewer management complexities as Dimension Data provided the full house of services, including “last mile” networking connections, cloud platform and SAP managed services, turnkey migration project management skills and tools, managed backup, managed disaster recovery, a managed service that included patching on operating system, database, and SAP applications according to client schedules. There has also been a significant increase in performance.
