Case studies: Cloud transformation in the Nordics
Written by Kristina Lekås
7th November 2024
One of Scandinavia’s largest construction companies was increasingly weighed down by its complex IT ecosystem, with many separate applications and cumbersome manual handling. It decided to do a full cloud transformation, driven by new requirements from authorities and customers and a wish to increase profitability. Among other things, the company moved all applications to Microsoft Azure with the help of Cognizant.
The result? After transitioning to the cloud, the construction company has reduced its costs by about 20 percent for data center production. Cloud migration has also improved several areas, like security, flexibility, efficiency and access to relevant, updated information. While the cloud transformation was a great effort for the organization, it also brought tangible value and enabled digitization throughout the value chain.
As this Financial Services institution set its cloud-first approach it also sparked a huge transformation process. Its Enterprise Analytics Platform (EAP) journey started in 2017 and within a year, an operational data lake was ready on-premises. After that, the solution was migrated to the Microsoft Azure Cloud, thanks to a joint team of experts from the bank, Microsoft and Cognizant.
A few years later, the first enterprise-scale analytical data platform on the cloud went live. After that, the bank started to explore a multi-cloud strategy, where best-of-breed technologies have been brought together. Soon, AI will be at the core of decision-making, supported by a stable, cost-optimized multi-cloud ecosystem that empowers business.
This Nordic FMCG company, with many different brands and consumer-oriented businesses, has a long history with SAP which now constitutes the digital core of daily operations in twelve countries. Its cross-enterprise IT division was formed in 2008, and five years later Cognizant took charge of the first large outsourcing scope.
In 2016, most of the existing SAP solutions were outdated and decided to build an SAP template that would fit and improve processes across certain business areas. With a cloud mindset, the IT division and Cognizant initially built capacity for operations and a couple of rollouts. Since then, the IT division has continued the process and for each project, the cost has been reduced while the quality has increased. All resources work in DevOps to maximize learning, system improvements and resource utilization.
Any takeaways? To turn potential ERP pitfalls (according to Garner about 75 percent of ERP projects fail) into success, securing buy-in from top management and down, focusing on leadership, understanding the full diamond of elements, and emphasizing change management are all essential parts of the project.
As this global manufacturing company was challenged by a pressured market, a move from B2B into B2C and sustainability ambitions, it needed to modernize everything from processes to the tech landscape. The company established a cloud-first strategy to empower its business regarding speed, innovation, cost efficiency, security, scalability and sustainability across operations. The cloud transformation journey, driven by business and tech teams together, includes several steps, where the initial assessment phase and the following business application migration are thoroughly conducted. Everything is scrutinized; what is the roadmap of a certain application, how can assets be moved without adding costs to the bottom line, what are the future running costs, etc.
Lessons learned? Focus on the “why part” (cost and availability elements are important), get a grip on all the apps (it’s a bigger topic than infrastructure transformation), decide upon multi-cloud or not, introduce change heroes, consider a center of excellence or platform, and have a strong focus on code.
To learn more, please visit our cloud section and the SAP section of the web.
