The view of technology consultants
Around 80 percent of the DAX 100 companies are among Alegri's clients, which receive individual consulting. With their many years of expertise, the nearly 500 employees lead IT and business projects to success. This growth since the company was founded in 2001 has resulted in ten branch offices and a nearshore location in Romania.
Modern technology on a new platform
In part one of this series of articles, the CFO's motivations for the S/4 implementation were presented, followed by the challenges for Alegri's S/4 module consultants. In this part three, the technological aspects of the implementation are highlighted.
At the beginning of the project, the decision was made to use SAP S/4 Hana Finance on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This meant that the required infrastructure could be made available very quickly.
"This was no match for the procurement times we've seen on other projects"
recalls Heiko Friedrichs, Managing Consultant at Alegri.
At the beginning of the project, access to the environment used was configured, because Alegri's employees do not work exclusively on the SAP S/4 Hana Finance system at the central location in Munich, but also on mobile devices or from the home office, and access was to be secured.
Hana unproblematic, robust and performant
The use of SAP Hana proved to be unproblematic. The in-memory database failed to shut down properly several times at the beginning of the project - and each time compensated for this unscathed with a crash recovery at the following startup.
"The client copies that were necessary at the beginning were done in a very short time, here the progress was very evident"
says Heiko Friedrichs about the initial work.
The current SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is used for monitoring. Here, Alegri participated in SAP's Early Adopter Care Program.
"When setting the diagnostic relevance of the Hana DB, the support from SAP was very helpful. We received comprehensive support at short notice.
says Heiko Friedrichs.
Thanks to the close cooperation with SAP's "Software Validation" department, the latest version of the Maintenance Planner could also be used efficiently during the update.
Cost optimization by 40 percent
By using Alegri's Optimization Services, the key indicators of the SAP system, the Hana database and the virtual environment could be evaluated automatically.
It was determined that an Azure instance with less main memory would be sufficient for development and quality assurance. This could be realized in the short term by changing the configuration within the dashboard in the Azure portal, and the costs were significantly reduced.
In addition, DEV and QAS systems are regularly stopped automatically at night and on weekends and restarted in the morning or on Mondays. By billing the Azure infrastructure instances to the minute, we save around 60 percent of the costs here compared to non-stop operation.
This automation was not trivial, as the SAP application server, Windows operating system, Hana database and Suse Linux operating system must be shut down before the Azure infrastructure instance can be automatically decommissioned.
To guarantee users the expected performance even after a cold start, a prefetch of selected tables is performed on the application server after the restart.
This way, buffers and caches are already filled appropriately and the nightly stop does not have a negative impact on end users.
In summary, the use of S/4 Hana Finance on Microsoft Azure involved a certain learning curve. However, the flexibility achieved and the opportunities for cost optimization for Alegri and, in the future, for Alegri's clients, definitely make this effort look like time well spent.
In part four of the article series, you will learn more about the strategic view of the "SAP S/4 Hana Finance on Microsoft Azure Cloud" project.
