ArcelorMittal South Africa has successfully migrated to Dimension Data’s Cloud for SAP, a Gold partner with a deep understanding of the impact and value that powerful cloud-based solutions such as these offer customers.
ArcelorMittal South Africa is the largest steel producer in Africa, with a production capacity of 6.1 million tonnes of liquid steel per annum. It first sought to integrate its business strategy with cloud solutions in 2015, intending to move its SAP workloads off its own data centre into a cloud services provider that could also supply a SAP managed service on these SAP applications.
To start its journey with due diligence, the company issued a formal request for proposal, and Britehouse, a division of Dimension Data, was first selected as a proof of concept partner before being awarded both the migration and cloud platform contracts.
Chris Dippenaar, Director Cloud Services for SAP at Britehouse, says: “As a global strategic partner to SAP, Dimension Data has the internal skills and expertise, a dedicated team who is willing to go the extra mile for customer-centric delivery, an excellent track record for delivery, as well as the first reference site in Africa to expertly and effectively implement, manage and support Cloud Services for SAP to ArcelorMittal South Africa. These were all major factors when they were in the process of considering partnering with Britehouse.”
Moreover, Britehouse has had the privilege of working with ArcelorMittal South Africa for close to 10 years, starting with a SAP landscape consolidation project in 2009. While the cost of the migration, as well as the cost of the cloud platform, was seen as a major hurdle, the two parties negotiated to reduce their initial scope. Britehouse innovatively provided alternative solutions that would help ArcelorMittal meet their cloud-based objectives and the two were able to develop a plan that would ensure the success of the migration journey.
The migration to Dimension Data Cloud for SAP was successfully concluded in August 2017, and at the end of August the first month-end was processed on the new compute platform. This positions ArcelorMittal well to move all SAP workloads to HANA, S4/HANA, and eventually S4/HANA Public Cloud, going forward.
Already the benefits have been great, including a sizable cost reduction due to converting a capex expense into an opex expense, not having to refresh hardware, a decreased cost of reliance on expensive SAP resources, fewer costs on procuring hardware required for a project, and more.
ArcelorMittal South Africa also experienced far fewer management complexities, as Dimension Data provided the full house of services, including last mile networking connections, cloud platform and SAP managed services, turnkey migration project management skills and tools, managed backup and disaster recovery, and a managed service that included patching on operating system, database, and SAP applications according to client schedules. Furthermore, there was a significant increase in performance.
Both Britehouse and Dimension Data have been recognised as trusted advisors and partners, enabling clients like ArcelorMittal South Africa to run their businesses in a manner that allows them to take immediate advantage of every opportunity, and better position them to carry out their digital transformations.
