ASK Chemicals Works with Arvato Systems to Improve DevOps Speed and Reduce Costs with SAP on AWS

ASK Chemicals, one of the world’s largest suppliers of chemicals to foundries, wanted to migrate a complex SAP environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve performance, availability, and security. It worked with AWS Partner Arvato Systems to ensure the migration was achieved without disrupting the business and improved performance, availability, and security for its sites around the world. Thanks to the migration, ASK Chemicals can react more quickly, is saving €1 million over 5 years, and has been able to build new business models.

ASK Chemicals, a global supplier of high-performance industrial resins and materials, migrated its complex SAP estate to AWS as part of a wider strategic move to the cloud. This move was made to cut costs, support new business models, improve the services it can offer its customers, and speed up its ability to innovate. The company employs 2,000 people but has a complex infrastructure spread around the world. ASK Chemicals needs highly reliable systems that can keep foundry customers running at full capacity as their factories never close. But it also wanted to be able to react faster and concentrate on adding value to the business, instead of maintaining infrastructure.

Its on-premises systems had become overly complex, which meant the IT team spent many hours on maintaining them instead of developing new services. They were inflexible and slow to scale, with new servers taking weeks to come online. A migration to AWS would solve these issues and ready the company for upgrading its SAP systems to S/4HANA.

ASK Chemicals needed to move 15 SAP environments, along with 21 SQL databases and 158 other servers. The business has 34 sites globally, so it required support in three AWS regions—Europe, North America, and South America.

ASK Chemical’s chief information officer Christian Dusek undertook exhaustive due diligence in preparing for the migration. He visited the headquarters of large-scale providers to assess their capabilities. “We chose AWS for the variety of business models it can offer for different services and because of its global reach,” says Dusek. “We required data centers around the globe to provide local service and support anddeliver low latency.”

The company used an outsourced supplier operating an on-premises data center and central storage repository to run its systems but was experiencing issues around latency and service. Building new servers took weeks, restricting the team’s ability to move fast, and time was wasted on infrastructure issues. User experience was bad as ASK Chemicals’ systems had grown complex and difficult to manage. This also reduced the company’s ability to innovate and build new services.

ASK Chemicals chose to work with AWS Partner Arvato Systems for the many strengths it could bring, especially its deep SAP experience. “Arvato Systems is very experienced but also immediately understood us,” says Dusek. “We’re a mid-sized company but with a very complex infrastructure. Arvato Systems understood both the benefits but also the limitations of being a mid-sized company. We liked its very short escalation cycles—things get done fast. And we appreciated that it is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Migration and DevOps Competencies.”

ASK Chemicals’ new systems had to improve performance, reduce costs, and ready the company to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA so that it could deliver new services to customers. It can now scale up services instantly rather than wait weeks for servers to come online.

ASK Chemicals supports its internal as well as external stakeholders with new services and strives to increase efficiency, and reduce the environmental impact of their work. Internal stakeholders are increasingly asking for integrated services that enable them to use more data to improve production and make supply chains more efficient. The migration also had to leave ASK Chemicals ready to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA. It needs to be able to innovate quickly in an industry undergoing rapid changes as geopolitics impacts on supply chains and as investors need auditable reports on materials used and environmental impacts.

The initial discovery phase divided applications and systems into a group to migrate as a straight lift-and-shift and a group of systems that should remain on premises or required substantial reengineering. This resulted in 56 straight migrations of systems, 15 that were either re-engineered or replaced, and seven systems staying in place. This general migration was accelerated as the COVID-19 pandemic struck and increased the need for home working—Office365 was rolled out in just 12 weeks.

The SAP migration was completed in 9 months and is on track to bring in savings of €1 million over 5 years. The cloud migration reduced overall compute costs by 20 percent compared to the previous on-premises system. “We are already seeing the benefits of increased flexibility and the cost effectiveness of moving to AWS,” says Dusek. “We can react much faster and we’re not spending any resources on managing boxes or servers. Our resources all go on creating value for the business.”

The migration went very smoothly with no negative impact on endusers or customers. Security has also improved. “We, like everyone, must operate on a when, not if, attitude to cyber-attacks. AWS gives us the visibility to assess our risks. But it also means we can easily run tests and backup checks in virtual environments with no impact on our production systems. Arvato Systems really helped us find the best of AWS including an AI-driven agent to actively look at our security.” Using AWS, it is easier to test back-up systems in virtual environments and lock down access.

ASK Chemicals is already considering new business models that will be enabled by SAP S/4HANA on AWS. This upgrade will allow realtime interrogation of data and the possibility of developing more complex Internet of Things projects. Using robust Internet of Things technology on AWS, ASK Chemicals will be able to support its customers in real-time, with remote monitoring of inventory and stock levels. That means it can offer customers extra services to deal with all re-supply and logistics issues. ASK Chemicals is also considering other data projects to help customers improve foundry yields, improve environmental performance, and supply active reporting to help customers provide audit trails for environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investors. These will be delivered through a self-service customer portal that it is developing on AWS.