Why Amazon Web Services
MCH assessed multiple cloud-service providers other than Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run
its SAP S/4HANA installation. "Ultimately, AWS was more cost-competitive than the other
cloud-service providers we evaluated," says Howard. "Plus, with AWS Availability Zones present
in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, we could keep our data securely stored and backed up in
Australia."
At the same time, MCH also evaluated transformation partners to work on its finance
transformation and SAP deployment. Again, the company looked at multiple providers before
selecting AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner PricewaterhouseCoopers
(PwC). MCH's confidence in PwC's understanding of its challenges and opportunities, their
ability to use technology to enable business change, and the security of their ongoing fully
managed SAP S/4 HANA service was instrumental in MCH's selection
Once work started, the AWS-based SAP S/4HANA environment was running within a couple of
working days. Uploading the files from the old financial system to the SAP environment was
"seamless," according to Howard. The majority of MCH's time was spent creating formats for the
accounting reports that would come out of the SAP solution. "The overall project was handled
well by all parties and completed without any problems," says Howard. PwC's business-led,
technology-enabled, and rapid deployment approach saw the implementation delivered in four
months.
The SAP S/4HANA infrastructure runs on large Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
instances and the company uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store files
and backups. Data resides in an AWS Availability Zone (AZ) in the Asia Pacific (Sydney)
Region, within a highly secure virtual network in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon
VPC) environment.
The Benefits
MCH is no longer at risk of suffering downtime with such a business-critical reporting system
since deploying SAP S/4HANA on AWS in May 2017. "With our old on-premises financial
reporting system, uptimes were about 85 percent. Using AWS, we get uptimes of 99.99 percent
for SAP S/4HANA," says Howard. "We come into work each day and the SAP environment is up
and running. We don't face the disruption we once did."
In addition to stability, the performance of the SAP system on AWS has improved significantly
over its previous one. "Our monthly reports, complete with KPIs, are ready in seconds with our
SAP S/4HANA environment on AWS. It no longer takes us days of manual work. We work a lot
more efficiently, and because the reports are generated automatically in SAP, we avoid errors."
In addition, the MCH finance team has improved its quarterly reporting for parent company
Mitsui & Co. in Japan. Before, the MCH finance team used to send only the data to Mitsui & Co.,
and the quarterly reports would be finalized in Japan. Now, all the work is done by the MCH
finance team in Australia—and Mitsui & Co. in Japan receives the completed quarterly reports.
"It saves our colleagues in Japan days of work and gives them a highly accurate picture of our
