Successful SAP HANA upgrade and migration project in Iansa

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Throughout its history, Iansa has had a key role in the development of Chile’s agro-industrial sector, contributing to the economic, social, and environmental progress of the regions where it operates. Initially dedicated to sugar, today it is a company engaged with the development of natural origin foods and has succeeded in consolidating itself as a world-class company. To strengthen its position as a leader in the food industry with a solid agricultural base, Iansa is currently undergoing a digital transformation process, which has been focused both on its business processes and on updating its IT platform.

An upgrade and migration to SAP HANA project, carried out by Novis and overseen by Óscar Mancisidor, Processes and Technology Assistant Manager at Iansa, was part of this context. “It all began with the need to renew our technology; our infrastructure was becoming obsolete and we realized that by migrating to the cloud we could reduce costs and obtain better scalability and flexibility to implement the company’s initiatives. On the other hand, our ERP was in Oracle database, which we moved to SAP HANA and, due to other business projects, it became necessary to upgrade from ERP 6.06 to 6.07”.

Carlos del Valle, Business Manager at Novis, says: “We developed a methodology based on SAP’s best practices and recommend doing both, the upgrade and the migration, in one step only in order to ask for one business processes downtime. Our experience allows us to meet the schedule of the projects we offer accurately”.

Óscar Mancisidor adds: “In mid-2017, we began a combined project which was very risky, for we broke the rule of not touching the operating system, infrastructure, database, and applications at the same time. It was an interesting project that lasted four months and included infrastructure migration, upgrade, and migration to Suite on HANA, and which required the coordination of different providers.

Even though it was risky, our relationship with Novis made it possible to execute this project with a positive impact outcome. In this case the Gantt chart was also met, both in timeframes and efforts, and we went live in mid-December 2017 with no impact to more than 600 users. We did though have some unexpected response times that reduced the system’s performance due to some internal developments and infrastructure issues which were subsequently solved.

This project had several synergies with the project “Subsidiary Adjustments in SAP” which was also being done with Novis. We made use of the testing plan and the systems integration. In this case, the tests were done mostly by the IT team and some key users, as this was a more technical project and less functional than the one for Subsidiaries. The IT team’s commitment was essential for the project’s success, which concluded without any impact to the business.

We are pleased with the outcome; the TCO was reduced and we currently have a robust and agile platform to implement the transformations the business demands.

During the first quarter alone, we had more than 500 request tickets for SAP system improvements due to the enhancements in the company’s processes. We are driving more dynamism to the business and can see there is room for further cost optimization.

We invite the SAP community to contact us for more information about Novis’ services.

Related Notes

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• Empresas Iansa integrates new sales channel with Mercado Libre
• SAP HANA Migrations