SAP on AWS Helps L&T IDPL Transform into a Digital-first Business

Infrastructure is the foundation of growth and economic development. L&T Infrastructure Development Projects Limited (L&T IDPL), a subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro (L&T), is a pioneer of the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model of development in India, wherein infrastructure projects are developed in partnership with the Central and State governments, as well as private sector players.

 

L&T IDPL is one of India's largest infrastructure developers with a proven track record across sectors. It is also one of India's largest road developers as measured by lane kilometers under concession agreements signed with the Central and State Government authorities. Another major domain where L&T IDPL is active is power transmission lines. Since its inception in 1995, L&T IDPL has completed landmark infrastructure projects across key sectors like roads, bridges, ports, railway metro lines, airports, water supply, hydel energy, and urban infrastructure.

 

L&T IDPL needed round-the-clock real-time data, access to data and systems from any device, anytime and from anywhere, data analytics, and seamless integration with various third-party applications for all its highway projects which spanned over 7800 lane kilometers, and power transmission lines spanning over 482km. To maintain its position as market leader and make sure it is future ready, L&T IDPL kickstarted the “FUSION” project in Nov’19.

 

L&T IDPL’s IT team were looking to leverage multiple benefits by implementing SAP on the cloud, such as scalability, flexibility, ready to use services, better integration, reduced maintenance effort, cost effectiveness, and enhanced security. This would help them avoid the hurdles of sizing or resizing the infrastructure in the future, and to overcome the fast-evolving nature of government regulations.

In August 2019, L&T IDPL approached InfraBeat Technologies, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner. After assessing various hyperscalers, L&T IDPL chose AWS based on its compelling proposal and its leadership team’s past experience with AWS. The company worked with InfraBeat on planning and implementation, and appointed InfraBeat as its managed services partner

 

L&T IDPL deployed SAP S/4 HANA 1909 along with various other applications like vendor collaboration portal, fieldsman mobile app for operations and management, bridge management system, multiple  interfaces with SAP from various third-party applications, and more on AWS, and cut deployment times for development environments by 40 percent.

 

“We chose to build our SAP and third-party systems/applications environment on AWS to take advantage of the integration, scalability, and reliability which AWS provides. This helped us to deliver high performance while generating business value through advanced technology and ease of implementation and integration with various applications,” says Srinivas Rao Kollipara, chief information officer and chief technology officer at L&T IDPL.

 

L&T IDPL won 3 industry awards for their innovative enterprise-level projects and technology usage in the industry.

 

In November 2021, it won the SAP Ace Awards in the “Game Changer” category for the “FUSION” project.

 

In December 2021, it won the IDC Innovation Award (IDCIIA) 2021 in the “Innovation in Operations” category. L&T IDPL was also recognized as one of the “Top 7 ICONIC Technological Leaders” in India.

 

In April 2022, it was announced as a finalist for the SAP Innovation Awards 2022, which is global in nature. L&T IDPL was the only Indian company in the finalist list.

 

Since the implementation of SAP on AWS, L&T IDPL has seen significant productivity improvements with the integration of its multiple systems, thanks to the continuous, automated data monitoring and real time visibility of transactional data. It is also easier to work with vendors, as the new system allows stakeholders to collaborate across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments any time and from any location.

 

Business agility has also improved. L&T IDPL can now implement system or infrastructure changes, or new requirements in less than 3 days, compared to 7-14 days or longer before. This has allowed it to quickly adapt to evolving regulations and technological advancements.

 

L&T IDPL has since achieved significant savings in capital expenditures with SAP and third-party systems on AWS and has moved to a pay-as-you-go model, using a combination of on-demand and reserved instances, which has improved their scalability and reduced business risk.

 

“Full-fledged implementation of SAP, integrated with various software used in business operations through interfaces, was a dream when I joined L&T IDPL. This dream has been substantially translated into reality and has become a way of life, through a big bang approach in implementing SAP in L&T IDPL Group,” shares P S Kapoor, chief finance officer at L&T IDPL. “As an infrastructure development platform, this massive integrated software is the first of its kind in India. We are proud to be the pioneers once again, this time in digitalization mode – similar to how we were pioneers of the brick-and-mortar infrastructure development space. The flower is fully bloomed now, and fruition is expected for all times to come. This will touch all facets of the organization, resulting in a huge leap in office productivity. We will get early warning signals for issues, leading to prompt actions, cost savings, and enhanced safety levels, which is priceless. To top it all off, a huge database is being created which will help in bidding competitively and facilitating sustainability of the organization.”

 

L&T IDPL’s implementation of the “FUSION” project was completed for 14 companies in 2 business domains – highways and power transmission lines – over 7 months. The scale of the project involved over 16 SAP modules including SAP Ariba Sourcing, the configuration of 14 company codes, 2 business units, 200 custom objects, 400+ Fiori screens, 800+ data files, and over 780 man months in terms of overall effort.

 

“Infrabeat and AWS were committed to keeping our timelines on track, especially considering these were carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic when critical phases of the project had to be executed remotely. The project demanded quick turnaround time to set up and fast changes to the infrastructure to cope with the project timelines,” commends Kollipara Srinivas Rao (CIO). “This project is a dream come true for us. It was a herculean task implementing a successful greenfield project with SAP S/4 Hana 1909 on such a massive scale involving 14 companies, over 16 SAP modules, and multiple third-party integrations for 2 completely different business domains. We converted the business dream to reality, amid the pandemic with our team working from home, and this was only possible because of passion, commitment, tremendous effort and support from top management, business users, and various partners.”

 

The company can now scale its infrastructure and reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO) by 40 percent over 5 years. This gave the company a more cost-effective alternative to running a S/4 HANA database on-premises. AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows the company to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction, paying only for the compute and storage it uses. Another major cost savings was seen by means of switching to various processors, family of servers for compute, and a wide variety of storage types.

 

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides L&T IDPL with the high availability it needs to meet government requirements while providing the flexibility to scale storage resources. Additionally, L&T IDPL uses Amazon S3 Glacier for low-cost, long-term data storage to fulfill its service level agreements. Using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), the company has removed the complexity of running and maintaining its infrastructure, allowing it to focus its resources on developing innovative projects.

 

L&T IDPL also has access to the AWS Marketplace, which allows the company to discover, procure, entitle, provision, and govern third-party software. The company can leverage offerings such as security solutions to enhance network security, protect sensitive data, and minimize business disruptions.

L&T IDPL now enjoys 99.999 percent uptime, which allows its team to focus on business innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance. The company’s next step is to automate processes and bring in new solutions, equipment, and applications across all the areas of operations and management, finance, HR, and other support functions using various technologies such as robotic process automation, industrial Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine learning, video analytics, data lake, business intelligence, DevOps, forecasting, and predictive business models. This will help them continue to be the forerunner and leader in their industry in terms of solutions and technology.

 

L&T IDPL also plans to further automate its trend analysis to gain insight into consumption patterns, identify unexpected costs, and find ways to reduce expenditure and increase productivity across all its operations and plans for storage of all toll transactions in cloud to meet the service level agreements and conduct business continuity planning.