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Mitsui Coal Holdings Case Study MCH Delivers Key Performance Indicator Reports in Seconds vs Days using AWS With our previous on-premises financial reporting system, uptimes were about 85%. Using AWS, we get uptimes of 99.99% for SAP S/4HANA. Craig Howard General Manager of Finance, Mitsui Coal Holdings About Mitsui Coal Holdings Established in 1982, Mitsui Coal Holdings is a holding company for Mitsui & Co.'s investments in Australia's coal fields. It invests in joint-venture coal mining projects and has financial stakes in 14 coal mines across Queensland and New South Wales. The company employs 21 people and has investments worth more than AU$2 billion (US$1.5 billion) in coal extraction. The Challenge Mitsui Coal Holdings (MCH) wanted to replace the financial reporting system it had in place because the solution no longer met its needs. "Reliability was a problem," says Craig Howard, general manager of finance for MCH. "System updates often caused source code issues that required hot fixes, and we could lose access to services for a few days." Besides the downtime, the system lacked functionality and a modern user experience. Finance users, for example, were unable to run automated monthly reports highlighting key performance indicators (KPIs). These reports had to be prepared manually and as such were labor intensive and prone to errors. It also took days to collate performance data reports from the teams managing the coal mines. "The other issue was that we couldn't do any real analysis of the data," says Howard. "We just spent hours checking for errors." MCH looked for an alternative solution after a 2016 flood affected the company's data center in Newcastle and took the financial reporting system—which was hosted by the system provider—offline for several working days. The company looked at leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions on the market, and spent many months evaluating the top software vendors—before choosing SAP S/4HANA. The next step was to decide whether to deploy SAP on premises or on the cloud. "When we looked at an on-premises solution, we saw the platform would need costly upgrades on a regular basis. The cloud economics was a lot more feasible," says Howard. "When we mentioned a cloud-hosted SAP S/4HANA solution, it got the backing of the IT team in Singapore, which is responsible for Mitsui & Co. subsidiaries across Asia Pacific, and of our parent company in Japan, which is currently migrating its IT to the cloud."