The Adani Group is an integrated business conglomerate in India consisting of six publicly traded companies with combined revenues of $13 billion. With businesses in key industry verticals, viz. natural resources, logistics, energy and agro, the Group had a consolidated SAP ERP application and additional peripheral applications from SAP for all its business units.
The legacy ERP Application could not keep pace with exploding data volumes and increasingly demanding business requirements. In addition to this data explosion, these business units became separate public listed companies that necessitated the need for segregation of business data.
“As the business grew, having a single SAP ERP application increased manageability concerns. Maintenance or upgrades often resulted in operational challenges, impacting the availability of Critical Business applications”, explains Sanjay Kotha, Joint President and Group CIO of Adani Group.
With new IT initiatives underway and digital transformation efforts afoot at the Group, the last thing Kotha wanted to fret about is whether his IT systems and infrastructure will adversely impact business growth.
Making business agile
To address this issue Kotha and his team decided to create a global template at the Group level. This would allow them to provide local benefits and allow autonomy for users to make changes as and when they desired.
After conducting a thorough market analysis, Adani Group decided that its new ERP system would be based on SAP HANA, the SAP in-memory data platform.
For any HANA project, the infrastructure plays a very important role. Adani Group also needed a powerful new platform to run this system. Aware that the HANA migration project would be critical for the company’s future success, Kotha wanted a solution partner capable of executing a smooth, efficient transition.
After evaluating various solutions, the team decided that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was the best fit to support their SAP upgrade and meet other business requirements. HPE provided SAP HANA Appliances with their industry leading SAP COE support.
HPE also added their operational services called Data Centre Care (DCC) services to help manage the data centre infrastructure for the next five years. DCC provides a more personalized, customized approach for large, complex environments, with one solution for reactive, proactive, and multivendor support needs.
“We chose HPE’s Appliance approach as it was an integrated Converged System offering with COE support” explains Kotha. “When you are dealing with so many HANA instances, there is a need of an experienced partner who has the experience of handling complex interoperability issues between the infrastructure, application and database.”
HPE Converged System for SAP HANA Appliances run at peak performance and reduces unplanned disruptions in the IT environment. Adani Group wanted to create a clear innovation roadmap, with these solutions as the firm foundation.
“In the first phase we decided to move to the SAP Suite on HANA (SOH). This would ensure that all BUs have their own database and their own instance,” says Kotha.
By doing this, Kotha enabled the business users to get a feel of the system, and over time allow them to decide what processes they want to adopt for S4 HANA. Even during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Group has enabled Adani Gas, Adani Transmission, and Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited (APSEZ) to have their own database instance.
Bright expectations ahead
HPE’s platform with a pre-engineered infrastructure has made Adani Group’s SAP HANA implementation fast and smooth. HPE solutions have provided more reliability, higher availability, and serviceability and are suitable for critical workloads like ERP.
One of the key performance indicators for Adani Group’s HANA migration, enabled by HPE, has been massive system speed improvements. Improved and immediate reporting has been another benefit of this project by operational and management teams. Some of the reports include production, financial management, and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data. The business now has clearer insight into real-time data.
“The report generation is on-demand, and this has enabled faster decision making. We are almost 100 times faster in running reports. This is a huge efficiency gain,” shares Kotha.
The users are still getting familiar with the new system and are measuring all aspects. “We hope that this new solution will support our business growth well into the future,” says Kotha.
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