Novis migrates Holding Vecchiola’s SAP systems to AWS

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Novis successfully migrated all of Vecchiola’s SAP system services from Novis’ private cloud to AWS cloud. They have been in operation for more than 6 months in this platform and the change has been transparent both for end users and for the IT area management team.

Here we tell you about the process and why they are satisfied with the results.

Vecchiola is a Chilean company that for more than 40 years has been a services provider for the mining industry. With operations in Chile, Peru, and Argentina, it offers integrated services for the operation and resource exploitation of open pit mines.

César Aguilar, Management and Logistics Control manager, tells us that “we are more than 1,700 people in the related companies, 900 of which are in Vecchiola, and of these, 140 are users who operate all the business processes. We are totally SAP, and have the SD, PM, PP, CO, PS, FI, HR, MM, and QM modules. We did a quite standard implementation, following best practices, with no Z-programs”.

Novis services to Vecchiola

César Aguilar recalls that “we started working with Novis since the very beginning of the SAP implementation in 2006, that is, 11 years ago. Since then, Novis has been in charge of the hosting and complete operation of Vecchiola’s SAP solutions.

During all this time we have had only one major incident, but the backups worked well and in less than three hours we were operating normally again. The SLA was met, which gave us peace of mind. In general, their support has been good.
Whenever we had a problem, we have met with Novis and sought for ways to solve it. We are satisfied.”.

Vecchiola has always delegated its SAP systems operation to Novis. Initially it was supported in our private cloud, and last year, following our recommendation, the company agreed to migrate its infrastructure to the AWS cloud.

Executing this process with Novis has three levels of advantages for the client:

First, the natural advantages of AWS’ infrastructure as a service (IaaS), primarily elasticity, agility, pay per use, and a lower total cost.

Second, the advantages of an IaaS service that has been encapsulated and standardized by Novis for SAP systems, where the integration of the SAP system with AWS is already resolved and is transparent to the client. Of immediate use, with no training requirements, the client maintains one sole provider, responsible for the entire service and for the defined SLA compliance.

In third place are the advantages of the Novis SAP AMS service itself, now based on AWS cloud, for it is a results-oriented service. It has been designed with a comprehensive service model, from the IaaS infrastructure to the SAP system. It has all the operational aspects between SAP and AWS resolved (for example: monitoring, backups, SAP uploads and downloads, etc.), and due to economies of scale, we can offer lower total costs.

In addition, it is also possible to migrate to the same AWS cloud other non-SAP systems, integrating them under the same service model.
Given the mentioned advantages, at Novis we are recommending our clients migrate to public clouds.

Project and benefits obtained

César Aguilar explains that “the global tendency is to save costs and our country is not an exception, least of all the mining industry. Part of the cost containment optimization is the incorporation of better technologies, such as the cloud. Before deciding, we researched about AWS. Then, in 2016, we began a twofold project that included the migration to AWS and an upgrade project for our SAP ERP 6.0 platform to the SAP ERP 6.0 EHP8 version.

We had to update the platform while maintaining all operational functionality. For that reason, the project considered the necessary scope and adaptations to maintain the functionality of all SAP systems.
To us, one of the main issues was to clearly define the migration strategy, analyzing the pros and cons of the alternatives, considering the time windows available. This required much iteration, as in our case a window longer than a weekend was non-negotiable.

Finally, we reached consensus with Novis and tested the update with end users, in effect during a weekend. Later, when we migrated, only us in the IT team made tests. Everything worked flawlessly, and we met the deadlines.”

César Aguilar evaluates the results of both projects with Novis and concludes: “I believe it was a wise decision to do the upgrade and migration projects together. At the end user level, the project has been completely transparent. In fact, those of us in the IT area work the same as before, we haven’t noticed any difference, and have the same quality of service at a lower cost.
We are aware that the global tendency is to move to the cloud, be it for better technology, security, or costs. Mi advice is to do it and take the necessary time to revise in detail the migration strategy with all those involved.”

To learn more about how we can help you with the operation of your SAP system or your migration to AWS cloud, we invite all SAP clients to a contact us.