ABM

PT ABM Investama Tbk Provides Agile Response to Volatile Markets with SAP S/4HANA on AWS

Optimizing the Mining Value Chain with Faster Time to Analytics

The mining value chain is complex, with numerous interconnected yet critical steps required to move resources from mines to end customers. Companies that optimize mining operations with real-time data can unlock greater potential and gain a competitive advantage.

Operating within Indonesia, PT ABM Investama Tbk (ABM Investama) is an integrated energy holding company that manages the entire mining value chain with its network of subsidiaries. ABM Investama is part of PT Tiara Marga Trakindo (TMT), a diverse organization committed to continuous development and the highest level of business performance. TMT is undergoing a digital transformation to move away from manual processes and on-premises IT, encouraging its companies to migrate to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

As part of the modernization, ABM Investama engaged IBM, an AWS Partner, to upgrade its software from SAP ECC 6.0 on premises to SAP S/4HANA on AWS. ABM Investama has been using SAP for reporting and operations management since 2011. The business wanted to remove on-premises infrastructure bottlenecks and speed up data analyses and data-driven decisions in the face of volatile energy markets.

“We chose to migrate SAP to AWS because it has the best cost-to-value proposition, built-in data and analytics capabilities, and proven reliability,” says Ahmad Salman Rida, head of digital & analytics at PT ABM Investama Tbk. “We were confident that IBM had the resources, experience, and methodologies to accelerate our move to the cloud.”

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“We chose to migrate SAP to AWS because it has the best cost-to-value proposition, built-in data and analytics capabilities, and proven reliability.”

Ahmad Salman Rida
Head of Digital & Analytics, PT ABM Investama Tbk

Reducing Data Storage Requirements in a 6-Month Migration

As a publicly traded company, ABM Investama has specific reporting requirements for its stakeholders and internal customers. Generating monthly reports across ABM Investama’s subsidiaries was an acute pain point with SAP on premises. Depending on the size of the report, it could take 7–24 hours to process the data.
 
“Data garbage”—including irrelevant data from divested subsidiaries accumulated over two decades—was bloating the company’s SAP system and contributing to processing lags. As part of the modernization process, ABM Investama wanted to clean up and streamline its data storage and faced a tight six-month timeline to migrate SAP to the cloud.
 
By using IBM Rapid Move for S/4HANA, ABM Investama was able to delete obsolete data from its legacy SAP system as part of the upgrade on AWS. Migration was achieved within the target timeline, and storage requirements dropped from over 2 TB on premises to just 300 GB on the AWS Cloud. “IBM Services went out of the way to ensure the project went smoothly, and the team played a crucial role in helping us go live by the start of the new financial year in January 2021,” says Ahmad.

Digitizing Reporting to Improve Accuracy and Drive Quick Insights

Reporting and month-end closing procedures are fully digitized with SAP Business Warehouse on AWS, and ABM Investama can now generate reports at least 80 percent faster. In one example, a key asset management report that used to take 7 hours to run now takes 40 minutes. The time required for month-end closing has dropped from 10 days to 6. “We can meet new group requirements to complete monthly closing by the sixth of every month and allow our teams to spend more time on value-added analytics,” Ahmad says.
 
The accuracy of reports has likewise improved with seamless data transfers across systems of record on AWS. One year after the SAP S/4HANA implementation, the TMT Group launched an initiative to forge automatic reconciliation of accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) for intercompany transactions, which account for 70 percent of ABM Investama’s total transactions. Previously, AP and AR reconciliation was done manually through emails or phone calls. Now, all purchase orders are verified in the SAP system, which has led to faster reconciliation and creation of statements of account.

Achieving Higher Availability with Lower RTO

Reliability has gone up since the migration, with ABM Investama consistently achieving 99.999 percent uptime for mission-critical SAP data. No news is good news in the realm of IT, and help-desk engineers report few to zero complaints regarding system lags or downtime on the AWS Cloud.
 
Backups and data recovery were additional pain points with SAP on premises. On AWS, backups are performed via six daily snapshots. This is a vast improvement from the previous practice of one system backup every 24 hours, which was manual and laborious. ABM Investama had a recovery time objective (RTO) averaging 12 hours on premises, which wasn’t on par with group or open standards. The company’s current RTO averages 1–3 hours, well under the TMT Group–mandated limit of 6 hours.

Visualizing Data via Mobile Dashboards on the Cloud

After modernizing its SAP software, ABM Investama started using SAP Fiori dashboards to visualize finance and procurement activity and route digital approvals for purchase requisitions, purchase orders, and work orders. In the past, managers working remotely had to wait until they were at their desks to manually approve and route purchase orders. But with the availability of mobile dashboards via SAP Fiori, the approval process for purchase and work orders has accelerated.
 
“Many of our decision makers spend most of their time working remotely at our mining sites, which meant there was historically a significant lead time between capturing information and entering it into our SAP business systems,” says Ahmad. “In addition to being able to keep our mines running smoothly, we now have clearer and more accurate visibility of operations across the group. This makes it easier to identify potential supply chain issues and scale our production up or down accordingly.”

Lowering Costs with Scalable Compute and Storage Capacity

The ability to scale storage up and down on demand and right-size compute capacity with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) has helped ABM Investama lower its SAP operating costs by 15 percent. The business anticipates a further 15–20 percent savings by deploying Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and enabling strategic sourcing, thanks to fine-grained insights into spending with suppliers.

Building an Enterprise Data Platform for Real-Time Monitoring

With the SAP modernization complete, ABM Investama is turning its attention to building an enterprise data platform that would allow management to monitor key performance indicators in real time. It has set up a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) that it populates using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). The analytics pipeline relies on Amazon Athena and AWS Glue for serverless queries and data integration.

ABM Investama is also considering Internet of Things (IoT) technology to directly connect data from its mining sites to its enterprise data platform and SAP. The business has big expectations for the enterprise data platform project to give it a competitive edge and transition its employees to a more analytical role.

Ahmad concludes, “The ability to leverage our data will become increasingly important to maintain strong profitability in the years to come. By working with IBM Services and AWS, we have gained the analytics capabilities we need to remain agile and competitive in a volatile marketplace.” 

Learn More

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/sap.

About PT ABM Investama Tbk

PT ABM Investama Tbk is an integrated energy holding company that manages the entire mining value chain. It is part of Indonesia’s PT Tiara Marga Trakindo Group, which is committed to continuous development and maintaining the highest performance standards.

Benefits

  • Reduces reporting time by at least 80%
  • Lowers storage requirements from 2 TB to 300 GB
  • Accelerates purchase order approvals with mobile Fiori apps
  • Reduces the time required for month-end closing from 10 days to 6
  • Achieves 99.999% uptime
  • Lowers RTO from 12 hours to 1–3 hours
  • Cuts SAP operating costs by at least 15%
  • Builds analytics platform to provide real-time data monitoring

AWS Services Used

SAP S/4HANA on AWS

SAP customers can fully realize all the benefits of SAP S/4HANA in the AWS Cloud for systems of all sizes.

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Amazon Simple Storage Service

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

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AWS Database Migration Service

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely.

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Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

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