New Way Now: Orica unearths data-driven success with Google Cloud and SAP

Featured in this video: Rachael Sandel, Chief Information Officer at Orica

Executive summary: Orica, a global leader in mining and infrastructure solutions, set out to simplify and modernize its IT infrastructure, migrating its extensive SAP enterprise resource planning system to Google Cloud in just 18 weeks. Orica also seized the opportunity to redesign its backup processes with Backup and Disaster Recovery Service, improving the resilience of its environment. The move has already delivered significant results: 18.5% faster response times across business-critical SAP applications and databases, reduced backup times from 16 hours to 20 minutes, and other performance improvements — one monthly business planning job now takes 50% less time, eliminating the need to schedule it on weekends. In addition, Orica can now tap Google Cloud’s powerful ecosystem to support its data transformation journey, including building an enterprise data warehouse on BigQuery and using Vertex AI to train custom models on SAP data to enable faster insights and better decision-making.

Challenge: Despite consolidating and standardizing its global SAP processes on a single S/4 HANA instance in 2020, Orica faced increasing challenges with its existing environment, including performance issues, high costs, and scalability. Orica sought to modernize its infrastructure to better support evolving reporting demands from the business and extract greater value from its SAP data.

Solution: With Google Cloud and SAP’s partnership to build open data and AI for enterprises, Orica saw an opportunity to not only modernize but also improve its resilience and bring advanced analytics to its SAP data. Orica migrated its extensive SAP enterprise resource planning system to Google Cloud in just 18 weeks. With SAP-certified infrastructure on Google Cloud, Orica can now easily scale to meet its needs while running its SAP workloads more reliably, securely, and cost-effectively. With Backup and Disaster Recovery Service designed to protect SAP workloads, Orica has redesigned its backup processes, improving business continuity and minimizing downtime.

Results: The migration has already delivered significant results: up to 18.5% faster response times across business-critical SAP applications and databases, reduced backup times from 16 hours to 20 minutes, and performance improvements on key workloads — one monthly business planning job now takes 50% less time than previously, allowing Orica to schedule when needed rather than on weekends. In addition, Orica now has full access to Google Cloud’s ecosystem to accelerate its data transformation. BigQuery serves as its enterprise data warehouse, consolidating disparate data from across the business for deeper analysis, including more than 120 SAP tables. Orica is also using Vertex AI to bring AI to its SAP data to enable real-time insights and better decision-making, including custom models that have helped achieve a 10% improvement in sales forecast accuracy.

By the numbers snapshot: Orica’s migration and modernization journey has resulted in…
Faster performance: Response times for business-critical SAP applications and databases have improved up to 18.5%.
Drastic efficiency gains: Backup times have been reduced from 16 hours to just 20 minutes.
Improved business planning: A key monthly planning job now takes 50% less time, freeing up employee weekends.
Better demand planning: Sales forecast accuracy has improved by 10%.

Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Rachael Sandel, Orica’s Chief Information Officer:

→ “Since moving our SAP workload onto Google Cloud, we've been starting to build up our enterprise data warehouse on BigQuery. At this stage, we've taken out 120 SAP tables and put them into BigQuery. The response times of our front-end user interface as well as the SAP HANA database has actually improved quite dramatically — almost 20% faster. We've used Google's backup and disaster recovery solution, so what would potentially take six to 16 hours, we were now seeing in about 20 minutes in terms of backup.”

→ “Using Vertex AI, we’ve been able to develop our own model and really customize it to improve demand planning and forecasting accuracy… Building our own custom AI models and bringing it to our SAP data, we’ve been able to see an uplift of 10% improvement in our sales forecast accuracy.”

→ “One of the things that's been really great about BigQuery and Vertex AI is we're being able to integrate our existing data solutions as well. The flexibility and the open source nature of Google and being able to bring whatever product in our environment to bear is going to be really important for us in the future."

Google Cloud products used: SAP on Google Cloud, BigQuery, Vertex AI, Backup and Disaster Recovery Service

Learn more:
→ Orica and Google Cloud: https://goo.gle/4m734bc