Empresas Taylor migrated SAP solutions to AWS with Novis

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Empresas Taylor was established in 1965 as a port agency operating in Valparaiso. Today, 55 years later, it is a modern holding company with presence in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, specialized in three business areas: agency, fleet, and logistics. Its operations mobilize more than 335,000 containers per year, serving about a thousand dockings during that period.

A Novis client since 2011, our company oversees its infrastructure, operation, support, and continuous functional enhancements of the SAP® platform. Also, we are its SAP licensing channel.

The company currently plans to become a first-line ship agency in digital transformation in South America and become a 4.0 ship agency. As part of this, in mid-2019, we began the project to migrate their SAP solutions to AWS, completed successfully by the end of the same year.

SAP migration to AWS

First, Empresas Taylor migrated to AWS the operational applications – developed in-house – for ship handling, cargo traceability, reporting, payment portal management, and others. Due to both their complexity and criticality, SAP solutions were migrated last.

Karina Cisternas of the Systems Division and project leader, recalls: “Víctor Madariaga showed us how we could migrate SAP to the cloud, since they had obtained successful results with other clients. They performed tests to determine which site was best for us (Virginia or São Paulo) taking into consideration response times, costs, etc. The job was done in accordance with the Gantt chart schedules defined by Novis’ project manager. We first migrated the development and QA environments, documenting what happened in each one, so when migrating to production the outcome was impeccable. The final process took place on a weekend, and by Monday we were already operating normally. We informed users about what had been done in case they noticed anything different, but it was completely transparent to them”.

She states they followed Novis’ recommendations on how to carry out the project, as well as the best place to host the systems. “We are happy with the results, as we in the Systems team noticed the improvements. And when in 2020 we had to switch to remote mode, the entire SAP operation could be done virtually, as well as the complete systems platform of Empresas Taylor”.

Benefits of the migration to AWS

In a press release published in the company’s corporate website on January 2020, Juan Carlos Jiménez , Manager of Corporate Affairs at Empresas Taylor, says: “The migration to Amazon Web Services allows us to provide a world-class service; access to information from both internal and external users is more efficient, fast, stable, and safe. Moreover, it offers scalability and flexibility, for example, to modify server load capacities according to the operational flow schedules of the agency”.

Three months later, in another article published in the same website, the executive notes that “The crisis generated by coronavirus (COVID-19) in various countries of the world found Empresas Taylor at an advanced stage of its digital strategy development, which made possible to continue operations and client services in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, with less than 10% of employees attending in person to their respective offices”.

Also, Juan Carlos Jiménez observed that “it has not been an easy task to switch our collaborators to remote work overnight. The important issue is that it has been imperceptible to our clients, and until yesterday we have been able to fully carry out 95% of operations”. And added that they are “prepared to work like this for a long period of time, if necessary. The fact that the company maintains operational continuity will not only have a positive effect on us, but also on the citizens of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, who need us, especially in these times”. Another aspect that has been significant in all the countries where the company operates is the notorious decrease in face-to-face paperwork and an increase in the utilization of digital tools by the maritime authorities.

Víctor Madariaga, Business Manager at Novis said: “We appreciate that Empresas Taylor selected our SAP AMS services on the Novis’ AWS cloud, and we are very satisfied with the outcome. We have extensive experience in SAP on AWS and have been able to advise our clients adequately to obtain not only an impeccable migration to the cloud, but also to achieve the business goals which drive these efforts”.

For more information about our services, we invite you to contact us.

Article by Gilda Valderrama, Novis Bulletin editor.