Case Study: Manufacturing

Orica modernizes IT with newSAP® S/4 HANA Digital Core
Orica turned to Cognizant to undertakea comprehensive modernization of
their IT infrastructure. The new system
now helps Orica achieve higher levelsof efficiency, agility and business
impact, and optimizes their capital
investments and operating costs.
Founded in 1874, Orica is the world’s largest provider ofcommercial explosives and innovative blasting systems
for the mining, quarrying, oil and gas and construction
markets. Every day, its staff helps mobilize resourcesthat are essential to progress in 57+ countries.

The challenge
Orica realized that to better serve its customers andemployees, they needed to implement automated, integrated
IT systems that could process sales orders, contracts andfinancial models to supply goods, and improve Material
Requirements Planning (MRP) forecasting. The process
would require the company to migrate its users fromlegacy SAP and non-SAP Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) systems, to a new, single and global SAP S/4 HANA
system deployed on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Users
included subject matter experts, business executives andowners, and supply chain employees among others.

At a glance
Four years ago, Orica realized theywanted to create simple, standard andmodern IT systems that could be usedanywhere, any time and on any device
by their users around the world. Theircurrent approach was discrete andcomplex, required manual processing ofitems, and overall was untailored to meet
evolving demands of the mining industry.
This meant they were unable to aligntheir offerings with the needs of theircustomers in a fast-changing market.
Implementing a single SAP S/4 HANA
system offered an automated, integrated
approach of their innovative products andsales on a global scale. As a result, Orica:❙ Saved $2M+ over three years
by periodically analyzing
cloud capacity utilization

April 2021

The need for a scalable, integrated enterprisesolution was evident, as Orica teams in
multiple countries had to rely on disparate
processes across the major mining markets.
A key goal of the project was to make it simple
for users to access the system at any timeand from any device over the internet, so they
could order stock, register the use of stock
or explosives, and perform other necessary
tasks. However, implementing change of thissize required strong leadership support.
“We knew that without the support of ourexecutive management, an endeavor of thisscale would be very difficult. Fortunately, wewere all aligned on the importance of thistransformation,” says Sascha Wenninger,
Technology Lead for the 4S program at Orica.
Orica’s directors and executives were committed tosolving the challenges they faced every day. For thisreason, they decided to reevaluate their IT Systems
including infrastructure and hosting programs
by addressing a number of obstacles such as:❙ Low visibility into company performance due
to a lack of standardized business processes❙ Poor data cleanliness and business intelligence❙ A lack of consistency across theorganization for product identifiers, actual
costs, sales pricing and discounts❙ Frustration caused by irregularities
with customer and contact data
High complexity and maintenance were also
challenges, calling for the current systems to
be standardized, automated, integrated andsimplified to improve business agility. Users alsoneeded easy access via the internet to maximize
productivity, limit complications and comply with
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Wenninger adds, “The transformation wasn’t
just an IT initiative to upgrade the systemand change the infrastructure, but an overallchange in how the organization operated.”❙ Automated 80% of systeminfrastructure❙ Increased system availability to 99.8%
with four hours recovery time and nearzero data loss in case of a disaster❙ Architected the world’s first
SAP High Availability (HA)
solution on Microsoft Azure

The approach
Believing in our technology leadership anddelivery capabilities, Orica engaged Cognizant
to design, implement and manage a global
ERP system based on SAP S/4 HANA. The newsystem would support operations for customers
in 100+ countries and standardize processes
for industry operations, create transparency fordecision-making and increase business agility.
“Cognizant leveraged its deep cloud technology
and platforms capabilities to architect, design
and build SAP systems on HANA, deployed on
Microsoft Azure. The team built business critical
SAP systems to kick-start the program right onschedule and implemented automation processes
in operations to keep infrastructure costs undercontrol throughout the engagement,” saysGabriela Azzali, 4S Program Director, Orica.

Creating a SAP-first solution
The Orica project, codenamed “4S”, was a nodto the solution’s design, which would be simple,
standard, single and SAP-first. It would generate
data-driven, real-time decisions and actions thatthe company and its customers could put towork. To increase overall utilization and efficiency,
the SAP technical operations were simplified,requiring limited customization for workflow
and matrices approvals, information lookups,
self-service tasks and fewer workarounds.

2 / Orica modernizes IT with new SAP S/4 HANA Digital Core“The transformation
wasn’t just an IT
initiative to upgrade thesystem and change theinfrastructure, but an
overall change in how theorganization operated.”– Sascha Wenninger, Technology Lead, Orica

3 / Orica modernizes IT with new SAP S/4 HANA Digital CoreOperating continuously
without failingTo vet the design of the system, Cognizant
collaborated with Microsoft and SUSE to architect
the world’s first High Availability (HA) solution
on Azure with a multi-node iSCSI interface. This
gave Orica the ability to automatically switch
to a reliable second node without any businessdisruptions. Additionally, Business Continuity
was ensured with automated Disaster Recovery,
which allows less than 4 hours of switch over to a
new site and less than 1 minute of data loss in theprocess of switch over via multiple POCs and bychoosing the best-suited product and solution.

Cost effective preservationof legacy SAP Systems
With the SAP S/4 HANA Transformation, Orica’s
On-Premise Legacy SAP systems migration to cloud
was executed by keeping in mind its touchpoints
with S/4 HANA system Go-live. This migration has
enabled Orica to enjoy the cloud benefits for theirread-only and on-demand nature of operations.

A true consumptionbased pricing model
The new system operations based on managed
Platform as a Service (mPaaS), now enables
Orica to choose from a pay-per-use pricing
model categorized by three unit-based tiers:
Platinum, Gold and Silver for their Cloud
Infrastructure and SAP Administration Services.
Orica can increase or decrease their workload
on a monthly basis. The model not only helps
Orica, but also creates transparency, businessagility and cost savings for the company.

Simple, easy-to-use accessacross platforms
When the program went live, end-users gained
access to a modern intelligent enterpriseapplication that provides a responsive userinterface with 1400+ Fiori applications for business
transactions in the SAP S/HANA system. They now
have simple, easy-to-use access across desktops,
tablets and smartphones over the internet.

mPaaS Automations
Cognizant has implemented its mPaaS automationuse cases such as Disaster Recovery Failover,
Scheduled Start/Stop, SAP application andInfrastructure monitoring automation, OS
Maintenance Automations, Azure Security Firewalls
deployment and maintenance automations. Theseautomations resulted in error-free, reliable andcost effective implementations and operations.

Business outcomesOver the 36-month implementation, Cognizant
provided a smooth, high-quality execution of thenew SAP S/4 HANA solution to boost efficiency,
agility and business impact, while optimizing
operating costs and capital investments.
Following the implementation, Orica gained
a number of benefits across the business.
The upgraded architecture for SAP S/HANA
enables Orica to quickly adapt to businesschanges in computed demand. This high degreeof process automation has increased Orica’s
operational efficiency, repeatability and scalability.
Users can now access the new system fromanywhere, any time and on any device—all possible
through the 1400+ Fiori applications that are
securely exposed to the internet using Azure
Application Proxy and Multi-Factor Authentication.
The new disaster recovery SLA for the recovery
time objective (RTO) is now four hours, withnear-zero data loss thanks to the Azure platform
features that safeguard backups against physicalinfrastructure failure and manual mistakes,
such as accidental overwrites or deletions.
Increased cost optimization let Orica terminate
colocation agreements with data centers thatoffered little value and were expensive to use on amonthly basis. Because of new recommendations
to use reserved instances and automaticallyshut down unproductive systems on theweekends, Orica is saving on operating costs.
A reshaped internal supply chain can now better
procure and produce supply by determining

4 / Orica modernizes IT with new SAP S/4 HANA Digital Coreand comparing the cost effectiveness ofmanufactured products in different countries,
while increasing the efficiencies of different
manufacturing plants. As a result, Orica makes
more effective decisions for internal operations
and when forecasting supply and demand.

Orica continues to pioneer innovative technology
for commercial explosives by actively finding
solutions for the challenges they face every day.

About Orica
Orica is the world’s largest provider of commercial explosives and innovative blasting systems to the mining, quarrying, oil and gas, and construction
markets, a leading supplier of sodium cyanide for gold extraction, and a specialist provider of ground support services in mining and tunnelling. For more
information, visit www.orica.com.

About Cognizant
Cognizant (Nasdaq-100: CTSH) is one of the world’s leading professional services companies, transforming clients’ business, operating and technology
models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses.
Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant is ranked 194 on the Fortune 500 and is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world. Learn
how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com or follow us @Cognizant.

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