The challenge
Orkla ASA is a Norwegian conglomerate operating in the Nordic region, Eastern Europe, Asia and the US. Orkla Foods, the largest business unit within the company, accounts for almost 50 percent of sales, hundreds of brands and close to 50 production facilities. The business unit was struggling with a complex infrastructure built around an aging SAP ERP system. As part of a global IT modernization initiative, Orkla wanted to transition its legacy ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA—not only across multiple business units but across partners, acquisitions and respective legacy systems. It was time for a unified, flexible, data-driven intelligence platform, and Orkla needed a skilled partner for the project. The company also wanted to address challenges due to the end of life of older SAP HANA appliances and to shift from a CapEx to an OpEx cost model to free up valuable resources spent managing onsite infrastructure and make future spending more predictable.
Our approach
Orkla chose Cognizant for its one of the biggest journey due to our strong technology leadership, delivery capability and experience with Microsoft and SUSE. Cognizant evaluated several technology solutions for Orkla, matching key sourcing principles of the program, and proposed hosting and managing the SAP landscape on Microsoft Azure. The SAP S/4HANA transformation, named Project ONE, was built on requirements from all business units. It was developed around creating a unified solution for Orkla-branded consumer goods deployed on a modernized hyperscale platform.
Cognizant, Microsoft and SUSE collaborated to build an agile, highly resilient and future-proof architecture using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Azure Platform. Cognizant applied its unique, accelerated, four-phase approach to cloud migration that uses the Cognizant SAP Cloud Assessment and Transformation (cCAT) Framework for SAP cloud enablement. Our accelerators reduce the manual efforts of cloud design. Cognizant deployed its mPaaS automation use cases, including disaster recovery (DR) failover, scheduled start/stop and maintenance automations, resulting in an error-free, reliable and cost-effective implementation and operation. The distributed SAP and ERP application infrastructure within Orkla was transformed into a highly reliable, secure and scalable single instance on SAP, which increased utilization and efficiency.
