success story

Virtusa develops a three-year SAP roadmap and executes Phase 0 of cloud migration for leading insurance and annuity provider

Virtusa’s client, a leading insurance and annuity provider, was struggling with its SAP landscape. The client was unable to keep up with SAP best practices which resulted in SAP systems that had not been upgraded or maintained properly for years and, as a result, were not providing the capabilities the client needed. The client knew it needed to modernize, but was unable to determine how to plan or even where to start. Virtusa developed a 3-year SAP roadmap that included remediating the SAP environment, migrating to the cloud, and driving a path to modernizing to S/4HANA. Virtusa led the cloud migration effort, including doing much of the technical remediation and archiving, to help the client immediately realize the benefits of a modernized SAP landscape on cloud that aligned with business requirements.

 

 

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The Challenge

Our client was working with a 10-year old SAP system that had not been regularly maintained nor upgraded.

This meant working with a system that had security flaws and lacked extendibility. The client was also dealing with large storage costs due to inadequate archiving routines. Since the system was not up to date, the client was not able to deploy SAP software packs that met new business requirements. Instead, the client had to execute mini, siloed IT projects to achieve new functionality. Doing this was not just costly, but it also kept development teams from working on other valuable projects.This lack of uniformity created many operational inefficiencies. For example, reporting cycles were very long and required a lot of manual intervention. Given the legacy state of the client’s SAP landscape, determining a roadmap to SAP modernization was a struggle.

The Solution

Virtusa began its engagement with the client by identifying bottleneck processes and associating them with business functions.

This meant conducting an analysis of the client’s entire SAP application portfolio. With this information in hand, Virtusa then conducted an SAP ‘Pulse’ check to determine the delta between the client’s current state and the client’s desired state. From there we evaluated S/4HANA accelerated functions against the associated bottleneck processes to determine what needed to be upgraded and migrated. 

This evaluation helped Virtusa and the client understand the order of activities that needed to be conducted and helped identify quick wins by capability area. Using its cloud migration and SAP expertise Virtusa created a Phase 0 pre-requisite plan that include cloud migration, archiving, and Unicode conversion. Virtusa led the modernization and migration efforts, delivering all 36 SAP applications on time. Once migrated, the client was then able to better consider its path to full-on migrating to S/4HANA.

The Solution
The Benefit

The client benefitted greatly from a remediated SAP environment on the cloud. To start, the client now has an up-to-date SAP environment that was compatible with SAP software packages and new SAP patches. The client no longer must initiate mini-projects to accommodate new business requirements by being able to leverage a suite of SAP offerings that only worked updated systems. This also frees up many of the clients development resources so that they can focus on driving other valuable outcomes.The client has also achieved the cost benefits and scalability of moving to the cloud.Virtusa’s technical remediation and archival of the SAP environment facilitated the client’s ability to achieve its three-year SAP to S/4HANA roadmap. This not only consolidated many disparate components of the client’s SAP environment, it also helped the client better understand its new SAP landscape and its capabilities. Included were details such as project plans for analytics and reporting that eliminated manual intervention and resulted in a streamlined reporting process. The client also benefitted from support for additional use cases around profitability and performance management, allowing them to manage additional business requirements with the power S/4HANA on cloud.

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