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September 13, 2021

Faster system deployment with SAP on Azure: thyssenKrupp Steel Europe bids farewell to data centers

In hindsight, big changes often appear simpler than they were. In 2018, thyssenKrupp Steel Europe was set to break away from its parent company and form a joint venture with Tata Steel Europe. In preparation for the planned joint venture, the entire SAP landscape was moved first to a partner’s data center—and then to Azure, within the space of just nine months. Despite a limited budget, high time pressure, and decentralized teams in times of the coronavirus, everything went pretty much to plan. Today, the IT infrastructure for SAP systems at thyssenKrupp Steel Europe is more flexible than ever before. A complex migration that was almost as simple as it appears in hindsight.

thyssenkrupp Steel Europe

The challenge: Taking SAP services out of the black box

It was the planned merger with Indian competitor Tata Steel that presented Ritchie Fomm with a challenge. Joining forces with thyssenKrupp Steel Europe would create one of the biggest steel concerns in Europe—provided Fomm, in his role as Head of ERP Template, was able to separate the required infrastructure and SAP systems from those of parent company thyssenKrupp in time. “The big question was: fully managed services or dedicated services?”, he says, looking back. “In 2018, we again placed our entire SAP landscape in the hands of a provider that was to host it in the data center for three years to begin with.” The comparatively short time period was for good reason: the joint venture with Tata was still uncertain, and cooperation with a new partner as part of the envisioned merger had not been completely ruled out. “The situation demanded greater flexibility from IT”, Fomm says, “but we weren’t in a position to offer it.” Fomm and his team are responsible for providing IT at thyssenKrupp Steel with various SAP services, including the entire HR system. However, any interface modifications, changes to server structure, and updates all had to go through the external partner. And this usually took too much time.

Fomm had prepared the SAP landscape at thyssenKrupp Steel Europe for the merger; the merger itself, however, was called off due to significant antitrust constraints. The contract with the hosting partner was drawing to a close and once again a decision had to be made on what to do next: “We still wanted to act independently from our parent company and be responsible for our own IT infrastructure so we could work more flexibly.”

Future-proofing, time pressure, and cost efficiency were important factors in a momentous decision: thyssenKrupp Steel Europe allowed the hosting contract to expire and made its way from the data center to the cloud.

The solution: Migrating the entire SAP landscape to the cloud

The schedule was always going to be tight. Planning in Q4/2019. Implementation in 2020. Migration completed by November due to budgetary factors. In all, 140 systems were to be moved from the data center to the cloud in just nine months. “When we were planning all this, Covid-19 wasn’t even on our radar”, Fomm says. “By the time things got going, all the teams were working remotely thanks to the coronavirus. Our movers, so to speak, were all sat at home”, he says with a grin. “But we were well prepared.”

The migration process was based on a full-scale systems analysis. Fomm and his colleagues worked strategically through an extensive list of questions: What systems are in place? How many? Which are still with the old hosting partner? What kind of back-up environment do we want in the new system? What are the data security criteria? Which systems are relevant to production and still need to run during migration?

The meticulous planning paid off. The move to the cloud went without a hitch—even from home. An average of six or seven systems were migrated every week, with a daily record of six productive systems in just 24 hours. The SAP landscape at thyssenKrupp Steel Europe was running entirely on Azure within the designated time frame. 

The benefits are clear to Fomm: “We can now plan service capacity better. Services that are used more will receive more capacity, and vice versa. This wouldn’t have been possible before—we simply lacked insight into our own systems.” Another advantage is that services are more readily available: thanks to improved flexibility and newly gained expertise regarding structures, services can now be deployed in one to two weeks, rather than the three months this generally took in the past. 

All systems are updated at least once a year, with patches installed every three months. Despite this, the new model costs just 70 percent of the amount previously spent on hosting in the partner’s data center. Fomm is pleased: “It’s well worth the extra responsibility. Yes, we may now have to spend more time looking after our SAP landscape than in the past. However, we’ve gained knowledge sovereignty; we can scale our SAP landscape as needed and provide services more precisely and quickly thanks to the switch in service model.”

“We were faced with time and economic pressures, plus the challenges that come with working remotely. Despite this, we managed to quickly migrate all our SAP systems to Azure—thanks to meticulous planning and the high level of transparency afforded by the new landscape.”

Ritchie Fomm, Head of ERP Template, thyssenkrupp Steel Europe AG

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