Transition to outsourced cloud-based delivery model for Oracle ERP

  • Industry Mining & Natural Resources
  • Capability Managed Services, Enterprise Applications
  • Customer Mining & Construction company
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Our client is a large engineering-led construction and mining company with around 50,000 employees working across leading infrastructure and resource projects around the world. It is an Australian listed entity, though it operates internationally in over 20 countries, undergoing a variety of activities in construction, contract mining, operation and maintenance, development, and delivery.

Opportunity

Our client’s organisation comprises multiple businesses, affiliates and joint ventures, which after years of growth through acquisition, resulted in a highly complex IT structure. This complex structure was characterised by high operational costs, multiple ERP solutions and software licences – made more challenging due to aging infrastructure – and an increasing number of varied type remote users, all with complex and costly end user provisioning.

Looking closely at its IT landscape, our client had identified its aging Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and subsequent high cost of service delivery as key transformation areas.

As part of this journey, our client initiated a business rationalisation program in order to increase its operating efficiency, with its core IT objectives to introduce and achieve the following:

  • Cloud deployment model to provide global accessibility and scalability.
  • Locally deployed production environments to cater for data sovereignty.
  • End user experience and system efficiencies equal or superior to legacy systems.
  • Reduced capital and operating costs over five years.

Following this, the decision was made to transition its IT infrastructure and ERP applications to an outsourced delivery model that would modernise its solutions, provide a centralised and strong governance operating model, and deliver significantly lower costs and increased efficiencies.

As a long-term partner, we we’re engaged to help our client find a solution or set of solutions that would help it restructure its business operating model aimed at centralisation and strong governance.

After thorough analysis, we put forward a proposal to transition the client’s ERP systems to an outsourced delivery model that would not only provide our client with immediately reduced overheads but would also simplify its global IT landscape. Thus, providing a greater return on investment over time whilst contributing to broader transformational objectives.

Solution

As an experienced Managed Service Provider and Oracle Partner with extensive experience in delivering successful integration strategies and services – we developed a roadmap to transition our client to the new cloud model and deliver the following:

  • An Oracle JD Edwards ERP solution for its global operations – Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia; running on an Oracle Cloud Platform.
  • Offer a complete Oracle ecosystem back to the client, leveraging the automation available in Oracle’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud offerings.

Our approach

Our approach considered three main factors:

  • The objective for cost reduction of ICT variable costs.
  • The risks associated with the transition from an in-house to an outsourced delivery model.
  • The opportunity to integrate business systems and functions to provide greater accessibility and insights across the global organisation.

In order to achieve the above, we broke the journey into three phases:

Phase 1: Transition

  • Successful Knowledge Transfer and transfer of identified staff to NRI.
  • Establishment of NRI Service Desk processes and communication plan.
  • WAN connection in place and working from NRI to client site.
  • Removal of most hardware and software JDE assets from the client’s balance sheet.
  • Customer Infrastructure and JDE Applications under Supplier responsibility.

Phase 2: Transformation

  • Complete software asset transfer to the Supplier relating to the core JDE.
  • Full consumption-based pricing model

Phase 3: Extension

  • Ability to recoup initial JDE licence investment via a set of licence credits.
  • Fully scalable, globally accessible platform.

Outcomes

Following the successful delivery of all three phases, our client now operates an outsourced delivery model with a strong offshore presence and works in an ongoing partnership with our NRI team who continue to own the core financials, reporting, and underlying platform service delivery.

Our client now has new capabilities that include:

Infra-as-code
Through Cloud Native Services offered by OCI, NRI have developed an “infrastructure-as-code” orchestration capability utilising Terraform and Ansible. By taking this approach, our client is able to deploy new environments, fully configured for application deployment, within hours not weeks or months. This enables growth opportunities to be included into the client’s environment rapidly.

Automation
This automated orchestration utility has reduced operating costs significantly. For example, Disaster Recovery (DR) environment kept with minimal functionality, estimated at just 5 percent of the total infrastructure environment. Should DR ever need to be engaged, automation builds the 95 percent of the remaining infrastructure and application system within 24 hours – all up to date and an exact copy of production.

Third-party integrations
Due to the specific needs of our client’s environment, integration with third party applications and utilities was a requirement. NRI’s broad infrastructure experience enabled integration with the OCI environment delivering to the client’s particular circumstances.

In addition to the above, we delivered:

  • A fully scalable, globally accessible platform.
  • A flexible commercial model with termed price hold.
  • A locally managed and globally deployed solution – catering for data sovereignty and security.
  • A consumption-based service catalogue.
  • Lower operating costs (TCO) over five (5+) years including transformational costs.
  • Direct Operating Company billing.
  • A Customer Success Management Program to support deployment.