ABOUT SCANIA

Scania is a world leader in transport solutions and a manufacturer of trucks, buses, and industrial and marine engines, specializing in heavy transport applications. The company is part of the Volkswagen Group and has more than fifty thousand employees in over one hundred countries. Together with its customers and strategic partners, Scania is pioneering autonomous driving and the electrical engineering of large work fleets. Through progressive thinking and technological innovation, Scania is driving the transformation toward sustainable transportation.

MODERNIZATION OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE & SAP SYSTEM LANDSCAPE

Scania conducted an inventory of its recent IT systems and came to the conclusion that they would soon become obsolete and required renewal. The company was looking for a modern solution in the form of an IT platform that was accessible, scalable, and secure. The means of choice was the public cloud at the world's leading provider, AWS, to migrate its own SAP systems to a purpose-built platform.

The first challenge was to design the required cloud infrastructure using the cloud service provider AWS. This would act as a hosting platform for all SAP systems in Scania's logistics department, to be provided in cooperation with SAP's Centre of Excellence (CoE). Furthermore, the goal was to enable the platform to be built for the deployment of upcoming SAP BW/4HANA systems.

Scania has been using the AWS cloud for several years in other business areas and as a result, has built both a cloud adoption team (CLAD) and a security team (iSEC). Both teams work with the AWS Well-Architected framework. This helps build a secure, high-performance, resilient and efficient cloud infrastructure as an operating environment for applications and workloads. With this in mind, migrating the internal SAP systems to the AWS Cloud was the next logical step.

FUTURE-PROOF OPERATION THANKS TO THE CLOUD

As a global company, the cloud provides the perfect environment for Scania as a hosting platform for complex logistics systems. Being scalable, secure, and widely accessible, the cloud infrastructure at AWS offers sustainable growth potential and a significant evolution of global operations for the company.

To build an SAP on AWS Cloud platform, Scania approached Zoi to partner with the company in the development, implementation, and operations.

As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, Zoi has the AWS SAP Competency and is also an SAP Gold Partner. With the help of this expertise, Zoi has carried out more than fifty SAP migration projects in the cloud. This has involved developing a customized and holistic approach to migration when it comes to designing, building, automating, and managing SAP systems and workloads in the AWS Cloud.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE CLOUD PLATFORM

The project kicked off with the project design phase based on the »Zoi Migration Factory for SAP« methodology. This is based on the »Migration Acceleration Program« (MAP) from AWS related to the migration of SAP workloads and systems to the cloud. The methodology includes the following three phases: Asses, Mobilize, and Migrate & Modernize.

The initial Assess phase provides the foundation for a digital transformation path of SAP workloads to the AWS Cloud and helps organizations with dedicated planning:

1. DISCOVER

The first step was to determine which SAP Systems are in use at Scania and how the corresponding SAP workloads are represented and distributed. Furthermore, an in-depth evaluation of the SAP landscape was carried out from both technical and business-critical perspectives.

2. BRAINSTORMING

In the second step, the objectives of the migration project were defined and selected or evaluated in terms of their feasibility. To this end, the material was collected and evaluated in a series of topic-related workshops. The focus was particularly on the technological and business objectives of an SAP migration. Furthermore, the target picture was compared and evaluated with established migration strategies and best practices from AWS, SAP, and Zoi.

3. PLANNING

Finally, a planning document was completed, which serves as the basis for the subsequent phases. This document contains the conditions, procedures, and goals for the intended migration of SAP systems and workloads to the cloud, which were developed in the discussion. The central components of this target planning are a valid cost model for the implementation of the project, the quantification of required resources, and a roadmap including time planning. With this step, the project design was completed so that the next phase of the »Zoi Migration Factory for SAP« could be started.

Both strategically and operationally, SAP is to become the new backbone of the application map at Scania and from this point of view represents a critical part of the infrastructure. With regard to this restructuring, the design project carried out was a complete success. The result included a specific design concept for SAP applications, which was implemented in less than two months. For this purpose, central cornerstones of the upcoming migration were defined, such as a new design for SAP accounts; moreover, a cost and resource model for the migration project was created, on the basis of which the next steps can be initiated immediately.

“We are very happy to have a provider that can demonstrate great expertise in designing, building, and implementing SAP infrastructure on AWS. Thanks to their own methodology, the design project was implemented in a record time of fewer than 2 months”, says Denys Popov, Agile Project Manager at Scania Sales IT and leader of the ARC team at Scania.

The successfully completed design project laid the foundation for the next steps of migrating SAP systems and workloads to the AWS Cloud. Subsequently, the platform infrastructure was built with reference to its future use in the cloud. Based on the design phase, Zoi built the first complete SAP BW/4HANA landscape for Scania in the cloud, which in perspective will include all neuralgic SAP systems currently running on-premise.

Following the design phase, the implementation phase was also successfully completed. Due to the high degree of automation, i.e. through the use of the SAP Launch Wizard Service, the provisioning and installation times for BW/4HANA were reduced by up to 75 % compared to a conventional installation.

Ultimately, the »Zoi Migration Factory for SAP« methodology proved to be a complete success for Scania. The processes and best practices identified ensured that the new account design, migration strategy as well as project planning, cost management, and resource requirements were accurately estimated and implemented – all in a very short time.

Scania is now able to build, operate, and scale critical SAP infrastructure. The company also adapted the new methodology with the help of its in-house ARC team and tested it together with Zoi. Henceforth, migrations and rollouts of new SAP systems such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP EWM, SAP Solution Manager, and many more can be performed. Zoi continues to work with Scania on an ongoing basis to jointly implement new requirements for the SAP platform or SAP systems and workloads in the AWS Cloud.

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE

In the course of carrying out the implementation phase, both Scania and Zoi were able to rely on synergy effects in the cooperative construction of the cloud infrastructure. In addition to using the AWS Well-Architected framework, Scania has a governance and administration model in the AWS Cloud, which includes managing applications with different models (templates, stacks, CI/CD, etc.) and a model for building AWS account types.

On this basis, it was possible to apply a high degree of automation in setting up the infrastructure, which was one of the key project requirements. For this purpose, Zoi used the SAP Launch Wizard Service, which is available as a service on AWS. With the help of this service, SAP environments can be provisioned automatically in the cloud. In this regard, SAP Launch Wizard creates neuralgic infrastructure components for building an SAP platform in the cloud. In this case, EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and specific network structures were created. Furthermore, selected SAP applications and SAP databases are installed using the service. During the implementation phase, SAP BW/4HANA and the AWS backend agent for storing HANA backups in a storage bucket were rolled out and configured.

Scania and Zoi were able to rely on synergy effects in the cooperative construction of the cloud infrastructure.

We are very happy to have a provider that can demonstrate great expertise in designing, building, and implementing SAP infrastructure on AWS. Thanks to their own methodology, the design project was implemented in a record time of fewer than 2 months.