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Case study

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.

SAP S/4HANA helps Orkla achieve results

Project ONE was a crucial step in establishing the Orkla vision, called Orkla ONE. With Cognizant, Orkla was able to modernize the ERP platform for Orkla-branded consumer goods with SAP S/4HANA deployed on Azure. This transformation made the company the first Nordic company to perform digital transformation of legacy ERP applications across multiple business units to SAP S/4HAHA platform on Azure. As a result of the SAP S/4HANA optimization exercise, Orkla ultimately saved over $99K+ in year one by periodically analyzing cloud capacity utilization. Orkla achieved 99.9% availability of services with 100% SLA adherence and improved stability and agility by provisioning SAP project systems on demand. It also strengthened data protection and business continuity with multi-site backup and DR. The upgraded architecture for SAP S/HANA enables Orkla to quickly adapt to business changes in computed demand. This high degree of process implementation has increased Orkla’ s operational efficiency, repeatability, and scalability.

Achieved

99.9% availability of services with 100% SLA adherence

Improved

stability and agility by provisioning SAP project systems on demand

Strengthened

data protection and business continuity with multi-site backup and DR