SAAM upgrades and migrates its ERP to HANA

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SAAM is a Chilean multinational holding that provides foreign trade services through three business divisions: Port Terminals, Towage and Logistics.

With over 55 years of experience, SAAM operates in 13 countries throughout North, Central and South America. They are the main port operator in South America, leaders in towage services in the continent and the fourth largest worldwide, creating jobs for more than 10,000 workers.

Raúl Cabrera, Manager of the Systems and Operations Division, tells us that “at SAAM we must be prepared to grow quickly, with standardized processes and the trade’s best practices. One of our portfolio’s project was the incorporation of Success Factors, for which we needed to migrate our SAP ERP from versions 6.0 to 6.0.7. In this context, Novis seemed to be a reliable and very methodical company, so we invited them to participate in the migration proposal by the end of 2014”.

The executive adds that “they proposed to do the upgrade and HANA migration in one project only instead of two, as we had initially thought. Their experience and work methodology were convincing, so we decided to do it as they recommended, saving considerable time in testing.

Therefore, in 2015 we began a project in three phases: SAP Upgrade (ERP, PI and BO), migration to HANA, and datacenter migration.”

For this project we applied the DMO methodology (Database Migration Option), that enabled us to complete it in one step only – what could have been 3 different projects using the conventional method – consequently saving SAAM substantial time and resources.

We also had to deal with several challenges, since SAAM had numerous Z applications, many users, and we had to enable their Solman and integrate it with ours. More than 400 resolved tickets and over 11,000 test cases throughout the project, on an IT infrastructure with 27 dedicated servers.

Marco Barraza, SAAM’s Systems and Communications Manager, explained that “the upgrade and HANA migration project, carried out rigorously in terms of timing and costs, included the phases of tallying and updating processes, and stand-alone and integrated tests (it should be noted that around 16,000 tests were done to ensure the tool’s accurate functionality). We are grateful to Novis for their proficiency, commitment, dedication and concern for this project, in which we went live without any major troubles. This speaks very well of the Novis-SAAM team.”

Additionally, Raúl Cabrera says that “since November 2015 we have been operating with HANA and SAP 6.0.7. The platform has worked well since the beginning, and we have not had performance problems. Currently, we are concluding the fine-tunning of services, such as monitoring.

We have been with Novis for almost a year now; 9 months in the migration project and 3 in operation.

In the future we want to add new technologies such as Fiori and S4 HANA, for which our platform must operate impeccably, as has been until now.

We also appreciate what Novis is planning for the future, with intense presence in the cloud.”

SAAM not only hired this project, but also initiated a long-term relationship with Novis by opting for our SAP AMS service, which includes the complete operation, support and maintenance of SAP systems.

We also designed for them a disaster recovery solution for a secondary site.

Find more information about SAAM in www.saam.cl

Contact us for more information about Novis.