CSC moves South Australian power company to SAP HANA

CSC subsidiary UXC Oxygen has implemented SAP HANA for South Australian electricity distributor SA Power Networks.

UXC Oxygen has been providing SAP support and consultancy services following the transition from SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business warehouse (BW) platforms onto HANA. UXC also migrated SA Power Networks' SAP portal and ERP/BW servers to a Microsoft Windows platform and moved new hardware to an enhanced disaster recovery environment.

SA Power Networks chief information officer Chris Ford said: "We are one of the first companies in Australia to undertake a migration of this magnitude, and thanks to a great team effort in the face of some challenging last-minute obstacles, it was delivered to plan."

Ford said that the existing system had been in place for a while and needed overhauling. "The move to SAP HANA provides us with a database and reporting system that helps us meet regulatory reporting requirements, and enables end users to perform real-time analysis on live data," said Ford.

The first phase of the project took six weeks and consisted of confirming the architecture and infrastructure requirements, creating a detailed solution, approach and project plan for the delivery phase, and presenting the findings to the Steering Committee. A trial migration to SAP HANA was also performed to test the approach, and identify potential risk areas and post migration tasks, according to the head of UXC Oxygen, Stuart Dickinson.

"The trial was instrumental in devising our migration approach, hardware requirements and landscape architecture for the new installation," said Ford.

The delivery phase took six months and was completed in January 2016.