Driving Faster Innovation and Modernization: Phoenix Business Consulting Helps Louisville Sewer District Move SAP from On-Premises to AWS

AWS Partner Phoenix Business Consulting helped the Louisville/Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District (Louisville MSD) migrate its SAP environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to increase performance for critical workloads and focus more on innovation and modernization. Phoenix completed the migration one month faster than expected, and Louisville MSD now runs its SAP applications on Amazon EC2, using Amazon S3 for data backup and archiving.

Louisville/Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District (Louisville MSD) is dedicated to maintaining clean, environmentally safe waterways for the Louisville, Kentucky, metropolitan area. The organization provides wastewater management, drainage, and flood protection services across the city’s 376 square miles.

Since 1998, Louisville MSD has run key workloads on a growing SAP environment, using SAP applications for human resources, payroll, finance, and other critical business functions. Over the past several years, Louisville MSD had experienced ongoing challenges with the on-premises data center that hosted the SAP applications. “As we expanded the SAP environment, it was becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage, and maintenance costs were increasing. With limited resources, it was a challenge to stay current and cope with the changes in the SAP environment,” says Sameer Ghare, manager of information systems at Louisville/Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District.

The organization also lacked the ability to quickly scale SAP applications without spending weeks on provisioning new hardware. “We wanted to spend more time customizing applications to better serve the business,” Ghare says. In addition, Louisville MSD wanted to modernize its existing SAP environment and move to SAP S/4HANA, the next-generation SAP platform.

To increase scalability and improve performance, Louisville MSD decided to move its SAP environment to the cloud. After considering several proposals from technology vendors, Louisville MSD engaged Phoenix Business Consulting, an AWS Partner and consulting firm specializing in SAP implementations and cloud migrations. “We followed Phoenix’s recommendation to go with AWS because Phoenix are experts in the field and know about the features and capabilities of AWS,” says Ghare. “We needed a solid, stable, fast, and scalable environment that could fulfill the demands of our business.”

Phoenix worked closely with Louisville MSD and AWS to lead the SAP migration. “When we started the project, we estimated it would take about three months to complete,” says Vikas Pathak, director of business operations at Phoenix Business Consulting. “Once we kicked things off, we were informed we needed to do it faster, so we brought Louisville MSD, AWS, and our team together to meet that goal.”

Phoenix helped move the Louisville MSD SAP environment to AWS, running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for data backup and archiving. Phoenix also set up multiple AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN) solutions for high availability and redundancy, and it uses Amazon CloudWatch for real-time monitoring of AWS compute resources.

Additionally, Phoenix is providing managed services for the new Louisville MSD cloud-based SAP environment. “We manage the environment and provide monitoring services as well as security updates, software upgrades, and full support,” says Pathak.

Phoenix helped Louisville MSD migrate the full SAP environment to AWS in record fashion-migration took only 60 days instead of the original 3-month project plan. Pathak says, “We accomplished the full SAP migration in two months instead of three, because of the reliability and stability of AWS and also the strong support we received from AWS.” The accelerated migration lessened the impact on the 600-plus SAP users at Louisville MSD. He adds, “Business disruption was minimized during the migration, so HR, payroll, and financial employees could continue their work.”

Louisville MSD also saw faster time to value from a shorter overall migration. “The district was able to start using its new SAP environment on AWS immediately, which means the organization can innovate faster,” says Pathak.

By moving to AWS, Louisville MSD has increased SAP performance for its users. “We have definitely improved performance. There is no lag or downtime, which we sometimes had before,” Ghare says. “For example, our employees accessing SAP on their mobile devices are able to work more efficiently, and all employees can access their pay stubs faster than before.”

Louisville MSD is also taking advantage of the stability of AWS and managed services provided by Phoenix, which means it no longer needs to continuously manage its SAP applications. “By relying on Phoenix to manage the SAP on AWS environment, we can allocate staff and resources to other important internal projects,” says Ghare.

Now that the initial SAP migration is complete, Phoenix is turning its attention to helping Louisville MSD modernize its application environment. To that end, Phoenix will direct a migration to the SAP S4/HANA enterprise resource planning solution. SAP S/4HANA provides performance improvements and an updated user experience. “We will lead the migration and add more business functionality where it is available for Louisville MSD,” says Pathak.

Once that migration is finished, Louisville MSD anticipates additional business benefits. Ghare concludes, “By running SAP S/4HANA on AWS, we are hoping to save money and invest even more in innovation.”