Challenge & Approach
What we did
Company
A world leader in the pigment industry for over 200 years. The organisation produces pigments and preparations to serve various applications – from interior and exterior paintings to car coatings and coil coatings as well as plastics coloration, corrosion protection, pharmaceuticals and seed colourings.
Business Objective
Within the scope of a TSA, separate selected IT solutions and applications without impact to manufacturing and logistics operations.
Technical Objective:
Controlled migration of applications (including SAP) on to a greenfield cloud infrastructure, recreating application configurations and ensuring the safe and complete transfer of data, whilst maintaining business operations.
Services
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
- Consulting
- Engineering
Project
Business Applications Migration;
We provided programme management across squads (located in AMER, EMEA and APAC) responsible for the projects to migrate applications from the seller to buyer. The primary mandate was to build new, mirror the configuration and customisation of each application; and then transfer the application data.
Required was an end-to-end approach analysis, design, configuration and planning (for migrations events); coupled with robust testing, providing assurance to the integrity of the data moved and the stability of business operations.
We managed dependencies across business functions, ensuring that what worked prior to change, did so post migration. Comprehensive communication and change management activity was taken across the business and technical teams. This ensured the change was technically ready, a runbook for the change event was fully understood (and rehearsed!), and that the business were prepared for the change (and fully involved in the activity).
Assurance was offered through thorough testing, starting with current state analysis, and test scripts built to mimic critical operations. Documented working practices were built into structured test plans that could be managed and executed, aligned to validate the change taking place. The test plans were able to be reused across the programme as they represented key operations; whilst a need of the programme they also served as a legacy, available to the business for subsequence projects and BAU activity.
As ever, we introduced and supported a robust and appropriate governance to all reporting, risk management and activity tracking. Milestones were identified and used to track progression towards the desired end state with all applications and systems safely arriving in the new platform, and all users able to conduct their work as they did prior to the change.
The result
Outcome
45 applications in scope ranging from single user instances to a global live data archiving solution (with integration to SAP) were moved without data loss or user interruption (outside of the agreed change windows).
Additionally, the SAP migration event was coordinated and managed during its agreed change window, with entry in to the agreed hypercare period and handover to service transition and BAU to teams.
A steady state achieved for future transformational activity (consolidation, upgrades, retirement etc.) which also included end user transition activity (user accounts, devices, and data) as part of the wider portfolio.