Sarawak Energy migrates SAP to AWS to accelerate cloud adoption in wider digital transformation journey
“Lemongrass very quickly became an extension of our team, sharing invaluable expertise, guidance, and advice, all while ensuring the project remained aligned with each of our business objectives.”
– Sarawak Energy
The company’s vision is to achieve sustainable growth and prosperity for Sarawak Energy by meeting the region’s need for reliable and renewable energy. With a multi-disciplinary workforce of 5,400, the company serves a population of 2.5 million in Sarawak and more beyond its borders.
Sarawak Energy aspires to become a sustainable digital utility by 2025, guided by its Sarawak Energy Excellence 2022 roadmap, under which digitalization is a key enabler.
The transition from SAP HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud) to AWS was a critical path towards SAP S/4HANA migration and was intended to provide the company with a faster, more secure, flexible and cost-effective environment to manage its enterprise-wide assets. The benefits of migrating SAP assets are crucial in driving efficiency and resilience across the business via modernized systems.
It would also support the broader mission of enabling the company to drive excellence in its operations, achieve top-quartile project delivery performance, advance its sustainable growth agenda and deliver value to all its stakeholders and customers.
Sarawak Energy began looking for a partner to support them in keeping all activities aligned with wider business objectives and driving cost optimization throughout. The ideal partner would bring experience in helping the migration, preparing the teams, and sharing insights and best practices on the scope needed to achieve the next stage of the project. Keen to capitalize on their internal expertise, Sarawak Energy searched for a provider who could add expertise and experience to the team, with flexible contractual terms.
Following a thorough search and evaluation of various value-added service providers, the company made the decision to partner with Lemongrass to migrate and operate its core SAP systems on AWS.
“We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to engage with Sarawak Energy as it continues its digital transformation. Our work together will result in a highly secure, stable and flexible SAP environment on AWS with enhanced levels of automation. Malaysia remains an important market for Lemongrass and we look forward to a long partnership with Sarawak Energy locally, regionally and globally.”
Onboarding and Implementation
Time was of the essence as the company’s contract for SAP HEC was expiring. The migration of SAP assets from HEC to AWS went extremely smoothly and according to plan. The team allocated sufficient time beforehand to extensively plan out the project to ensure minimal disruption throughout the deployment.
From beginning to end, phase one of the migration took five months. Lemongrass will manage Sarawak’s landscape for the next three years through Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP). LCP, built on Cloud-native technology, enables differentiated Managed Services for SAP and its related workloads with unified Cloud orchestration management, operations and rapid access to new innovations. Stage two involves transitioning the SAP systems from on-premises to AWS.
“Throughout the entire process, we felt assured that we had picked the right partner to help us progress to the next phase of migration. The collaboration between our internal team and the Lemongrass experts meant that the transition was a success and has established a strong foundation for stage two.”
Success and Benefits
Sarawak Energy’s partnership with Lemongrass has delivered strong results for the business, with a successful migration at its center. As the team stabilized stage one of the transition, the company was able to progress to stage two, which included scoping out the next steps on a granular level.
Lemongrass’s expertise provided Sarawak Energy with the guidance needed to guarantee operational efficiency, as well as ensure that the needs and requirements of the business were met. Very quickly, a strong partnership was formed which resulted in greater collaboration.
In addition to meeting the overarching goal of stabilizing and progressing the SAP to AWS transition, the Sarawak Energy team has benefited from learning new technical skills and gaining market-related knowledge that can be applied to projects outside of the migration.
Key Benefits
- Provides a more secure, stable, flexible, and cost-effective environment for SAP systems and applications
- Enables a sustainable digital utility by 2025 as part of their Sarawak Energy Excellence 2022 roadmap
- Eliminates infrastructure as an inhibitor to any plans for the future
- Provides the ability to easily scale to deploy more workloads on AWS when required
“Sarawak Energy aspires to become a sustainable digital utility by 2025. As part of our Sarawak Energy Excellence 2022 roadmap, we continue to learn and adopt new technologies to maintain our relevance and grow value, leveraging digital technologies to stay competitive in this age of rapid change. This also requires us to establish purposeful collaboration with partners who have the required expertise and tools. We are happy to have Lemongrass onboard to help support our digitalization journey.”
From the very beginning, it was crucial that all objectives outlined for the migration project aligned with Sarawak Energy’s six business drivers:
- HSSE Excellence
- Operational Excellence
- Project Delivery Excellence
- Talent Management Excellence
- High-Performance Culture
- Commercial Excellence
The Next Steps and Beyond
Future work between Sarawak Energy and Lemongrass includes the consolidation between the on-premises SAP ERP Central Component 6.0 system and the existing SAP S/4HANA system(s) that are now on AWS. This is expected to start in 2022. A key focus for the Sarawak Energy team moving forward is identifying which applications need moving from on-premises to AWS. The primary driver for an ongoing ‘cloud-first’ strategy is commercial excellence and keeping business objectives at the center of all activity.
“Above all else, our journey with Lemongrass so far has provided our team with valuable learnings for future projects. For any organization in the planning phases for their own SAP to Cloud migration, involving stakeholders from the word ‘go’ is of critical importance. Even those not directly involved in the migration process will be impacted in the long run, so it helps to be communicative from the start. Beyond that, it quickly became clear that change management is a must for all business-wide projects. Preparing your team and spending sufficient time aligning corporate strategy direction with everyone involved – directly and indirectly – is invaluable.”
Recommendations:
Learn more about SAP on AWS with Lemongrass | View all Case Studies | Download Case Study
Related Media:
InsideSAP ASIA: Sarawak Energy Taps Lemongrass for SAP to AWS Cloud Migration
IntelligentCIO: Lemongrass partners with Sarawak Energy to migrate its SAP systems on AWS
