Saesa Group completes SAP HANA upgrade and migration project successfully

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Grupo Saesa participates in the electricity generation, transmission, and distribution industry in the southern region of Chile through four companies: Saesa, Luz Osorno, Edelaysen, and Frontel.

The company delivers electricity to more than 850,000 customers and manages over 61,000 km of power lines, being the country’s largest electrical grid. The IT department provides services to the entire group and manages two local sites in the city of Osorno.

It recently concluded a project for technical updates and migration to SAP HANA, overseen by Novis, who also provided and implemented the infrastructure in Saesa’s sites.

Luis Ziehe, manager of the IT Business Solutions area in the Systems Assistant Office, tells us: “Our SAP systems were all in outdated versions. Initially we evaluated doing only a technical update, however, we realized there were many advantages in migrating to SAP HANA, such as being able to use the new technologies and functions provided by SAP HANA and SAP Fiori.

Therefore, both for the advantages of the technical update and for the possibility of incorporating new SAP solutions in the future, we decided to migrate to SAP HANA as well, in a single project.

While doing this assesment, we found there was little experience in the market. To validate the providers, we spoke to their clients, and those of Novis conveyed much confidence and peace of mind, so our decision was based on this. And we were not wrong. The project, which included the ERP, PI, and Portal upgrades, was extraordinarily smooth, everything went according to plan, there were no complaints.

It surprised me because I never had experienced a project like this one. A close relationship was established between our team and Novis’, which made the process effortless.”
Based on your experience with the migration process, what would you recommend to others who are considering similar projects?

Luis Ziehe indicates: “A migration project to SAP HANA should be planned in two phases: the first one of technical nature only, where the migration is done from a traditional database to another such as HANA. And in the second phase, formalize functional projects that make use of the new features in SAP HANA and Fiori.

This will first allow the platform to stabilize without disturbing users, who receive a direct benefit with significantly better response times, to later verify SAP’s promise of replacing those “hard” screens by more user-friendly channels, this time in web environments.”

Paulina Salas, Account Manager at Novis recalls: “In parallel to this project, Saesa was doing a BPC implementation project on BW HANA, when the servers were delayed in customs.

To meet our promise and prevent this from affecting them by delaying their project, we set up everything that was necessary in a public cloud (AWS), so Saesa could begin working readily. Later, when the new servers were ready, we migrated everything to the new environment, being the process transparent to the client.”

Luis Zeihe concludes: “The SAP HANA upgrade and migration gave us a robust and reliable base to now migrate to a SAP IS-U solution that will replace our business management system, which is the core of our industry.

We are very satisfied with Novis’ commitment in solving our problems; it is a company that gives us enough reliability to establish a long-term strategic relationship.

They were recently awarded the tender to manage our entire SAP platform and we are currently setting up the conferred services:

· Infrastructure management

· SAP BASIS management

· Functional support service (SAP Application Manager)”

Please contact us to learn more about how we can help you with your SAP HANA or SAP Fiori migration projects.