Capgemini migrates Centrica’s ERP platform to the AWS Cloud

Client: Centrica

Region: United Kingdom

Industry: Energy and Utilities

Challenges: Faced with business agility demands alongside a customer promise of ‘helping you run your world in more sustainable ways’, Centrica wanted to deliver a more agile and green set of enterprise solutions with a move from on-premises IT to cloud.

Solution: Partnering with Capgemini, Centrica transitioned its core financial SAP S/4HANA platform to the Amazon Web Services cloud environment within a 10-week period.

Benefits:

• 20-30% cost reduction for finance operations
• Ability to reconfigure/expand at speed
• Improved access to and use of real- time data
• 67 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent saved annually

Migrating from on-premises data storage and processing to the cloud

When providing services as critical as energy and utilities to 9 million customers, it is essential for Centrica that all of its systems and processes function smoothly so that its 26,000 employees can do their jobs efficiently. These core systems are built upon the SAP S/4HANA ERP platform, which was hosted on more than 130 servers. As a result, when the time came for Centrica to evolve this platform without disrupting the performance of its software, the organisation knew that it would have to choose a trusted partner who could deliver the most appropriate solutions.

This led to Centrica choosing Capgemini to migrate the S/4HANA platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Capgemini’s lengthy history of successful collaborations and deep experience with Centrica’s ERP platform made it the natural partner of choice to ensure that the transition was completed quickly and with minimal disturbance to its services. With a single team consisting of Centrica business leaders, Capgemini experts and AWS solution architects, a rapid initiative was launched to introduce the cloud environment.

AWS supports the SAP S/4HANA platform

Timescales were exceptionally challenging. Over a 10-week period, the team worked collaboratively to accelerate and reduce the risk of the migration. This involved the introduction of operational best practices for SAP workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines as well as a combination of technologies that delivered the necessary level of data storage.

Capgemini then built a highly secure landing zone, onto which they deployed a cloud management platform to automate the deployment of identity and access management, governance, and data security controls for the Amazon EC2 instances that ran SAP applications. All of this was accomplished even as the team had to work entirely remotely as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

“Working remotely was new to all of us,” explains Lloyd Smith, director of enterprise systems and services (SAP) at Centrica. “Yet we managed to build a platform of 130-plus virtual machines and migrate 15 SAP applications and around 35 terabytes of data in just 10 weeks without disruption to the organisation.”