Mining leader South32 builds an SAP cloud future by boosting data efficiency and performance with Azure

New capabilities, new customers, new opportunities—all positive results from mergers and acquisitions. But those major changes can also bring new systems, new complexity, and initial challenges. Perth, Western Australia–headquartered mining and metals company South32 experienced this firsthand. Like many corporate entities inheriting infrastructure and processes from other companies, South32 initially faced challenges in trying to consolidate business and IT functions in an efficient manner, including managing its massive SAP landscape. South32’s IT leaders knew the company’s future lay in migrating to SAP S/4HANA. So, they decided the best path to achieve that goal was to transition the 110-terabyte landscape to a fit-for-purpose ERP system hosted on Microsoft Azure in Australia, executed with low risk and no compromise using a RISE with SAP on Azure transformation.

SAP is a foundational enterprise system for South32. The company uses SAP at every operational and functional level to perform a broad range of critical tasks related to finance, HR, procurement, asset management, and marketing. “SAP is a critical software system for us,” states Stuart Munday, Group Manager, ERP at South32. RISE with SAP on Azure and SAP’s Private Cloud Edition remove the infrastructure-level management activities and present us with a simple service catalogue–based approach for managing our application activities.”

Building a scalable, easy-to-manage system environment using SAP S/4HANA with RISE on Azure

Immediately following the de-merger from BHP, the company inherited an ERP environment and shifted it to a Johannesburg, South Africa, datacenter running on IBM AIX. This setup was difficult to manage, lacked scalability, and the datacenter agreement was due to expire, creating urgency around finding a new solution. 

Supported by its strong relationship with Microsoft and working within a framework of tight deadlines and geographical challenges, South32 successfully decommissioned its legacy SAP environment. Munday describes the cutover, completed in November 2022, as “Horizon One.” The company has two more steps in the works. “Horizon Two” involves consolidating and optimizing its SAP landscape, and “Horizon Three” will be a final full migration to SAP S/4HANA with RISE on Azure.

Partnerships accelerate cloud transformation

Munday reports an extremely smooth migration to Azure, with close collaboration between South32 and Microsoft along with SAP and key partner TCS. After the company went live, it entered a hypercare phase, verifying the new infrastructure, upgrading software versions, and conducting regression testing. “We experienced a typical number of incidents, and only one of those was a Priority Two—that’s an awesome outcome for all the teams involved,” says Munday.

South32 was impressed by the teamwork exhibited across the board. “SAP did the heavy lifting from an application perspective, and we got help from TCS through Microsoft to build the infrastructure environments and for application managed support. TCS will be a valued partnership going forward,” says Munday. “We also relied on the excellent Microsoft SAP resources to help provide some assurance around sizing. Obviously, SAP has their recommendations, but we also wanted some independence. We were very keen to make sure that all of our strategic partners were playing in the same sandpit happily, and it worked beautifully.”

The South32, Microsoft, and TCS teams accelerated the migration of the South32 SAP estate from South Africa to Australia by using Azure Blob Storage and the Microsoft backbone to seamlessly migrate the files. South32 also utilizes Azure NetApp Files for the shared SAP storage, and portions of the actual database storage are on 20 E-series Azure virtual machines equipped with Azure Premium SSD.

Data consolidation and operational efficiency on the horizon

The SAP migration to Azure prepared the South32 IT teams well for Horizon Two. One of the key goals for this phase is simplification. Munday says there is an opportunity to work towards a greater level of standardization and robust repeatability across the business. “We inherited thousands of customizations in the environment,” reveals Munday. “There’s an opportunity to streamline our landscape, move to more standardized business processes, and then automate to make it more efficient.”

To this end, the South32 team reduced the SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) database size by about two-thirds. “We started out with an SAP ECC environment that was about 9.3 terabytes, and Azure efficiencies helped us get it down to only 3 terabytes,” says Munday. “Our teams have been helped by not seeing as much legacy data in the system as they used to and by improvements in system performance.” South32’s hybrid estate is running predominantly on Windows Server, with 141 servers on Azure and another 55 in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.

Flexibility, performance gains, and peace of mind for South32

Munday notes numerous benefits so far for South32 in its SAP on Azure migration, starting with simplification and standardization. “Previously, we had one team responsible for the Windows environments and another team responsible for the AIX environments. It was all niche skills without a lot of crossover, so if we lost a couple of AIX people, we had a real problem,” Munday recalls. “Now that we’ve moved our SAP landscape to Azure, we have more breadth of coverage. Our environments are standardized, which provides our infrastructure team with much better tools to manage consumption and give us transparency around costs.”

Munday also praises the flexibility and performance gains that come with an Azure deployment. “We can have applications running on resources of different sizes and at different scales, and we can respond quickly and adapt to meet business needs as they change,” he says.

South32 has cyclical peak periods. For example, a lot of finance-related SAP activity occurs at the end of each month. “In the old datacenter world, we had to buy memory and get it shipped from a vendor to accommodate spikes in demand,” recounts Munday. “Now, we can just ramp up available resources for peak times and ramp down in between, giving us cost-optimized capabilities. That’s a tremendous benefit with Azure.”

Finally, Munday is grateful for the peace of mind that Azure brings. “With Azure, our data can be recovered in a fraction of the time it can take when physical equipment goes down, and that’s a big selling point for us,” he says. “There’s something very reassuring about knowing our critical systems are living in a Microsoft datacenter. That’s true resilience.”

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