Laing O'Rourke - S/4HANA migration

Initially a move to Business Suite on HANA was evaluated but after some consideration and discussions with SAP directly, a POC for S/4HANA was conducted, allowing the team to have a 'look and feel' at the new application set. This built confidence and de-risked the project and it was decided a migration to S/4HANA was the way forward.

This was an innovative approach for the construction industry, where greenfield deployments are usually preferred to a migration strategy, due to old legacy processes and data. With a strong internal SAP and IT team, the missing link was the SAP BASIS and SAP HANA expertise required to ensure a seamless end-to-end migration.

A new partner was needed - one who understood the business, their goals, and who could operate seamlessly as an extension to the Laing O'Rourke team. Following a meeting at the UK's leading SAP event, UKISUG Connect, Laing O'Rourke quickly decided Centiq was that partner.

The next focus was a comprehensive plan for the migration of the current ECC6 system to S/4HANA. Working closely with the Laing O'Rourke team, Centiq gained an in-depth understanding of the business's internal and external processes, which in turn allowed us to document and plan the detailed build requirements. Once delivered and analysed, this initial phase was promptly followed by infrastructure installation.

Next was the implementation of the granular migration plan: Dev System Migration, Test System Creation, DR Test on pre-Production system, Production System Migration and conversion of the old ECC system to read only, to name a few. A number of trial migration runs were completed, which gave us the opportunity to iron out any cutover issues, align timelines and provide the business with the confidence for required system downtime during the Go-Live weekend.

Throughout the design, build and migration phases Centiq and the Laing O'Rourke team had regular collaboration to ensure communication was clear and the programme achieved all milestones, with systems going live over Easter weekend, 2020.

Centiq will continue to deliver a proactive managed service over the next three years, covering day-to-day support, change management, security patching, Linux and BASIS support, and providing a business-ready S/4HANA platform for the Laing O'Rourke SAP team. This proactive approach to delivering a managed service allows for more innovation and continuous improvements throughout the relationship.