Kirana Megatara Achieves Near-Zero Downtime for its SAP While Saving 20 Percent on IT Hardware Costs

Kirana Megatara is a leading producer of crumb rubber with a near 20 percent market share in Indonesia as of 2022. The company has 16 factories across the country and exports around 500 thousand metric tons of rubber products each year to leading tire manufacturers in Asia, Europe, and North America.

In 2021, Kirana Megatara worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and PT Central Data Technology (CDT), an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, to migrate its SAP ECC6 workloads from its on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. Aside from improving its disaster recovery capabilities, Kirana Megatara cut IT hardware costs by 20 percent. The migration also helped the organization achieve near-zero downtime for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, as well as eliminated errors due to manual input.

Using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Kirana Megatara now enjoys high availability of 99.999 percent across all its factories. This allows teams to maintain up-to-date inventory data, which in turn leads to more accurate purchasing decisions when procuring rubber and other raw materials. In the past, factories located in remote regions would experience disruptions to the SAP system up to 3 times per week. Each disruption also took up to 1 hour to resolve.

Real-time updates also helped Kirana Megatara minimize data entry errors. Previously, when access to SAP was disrupted, staff had to manually input the weights and prices of the rubber purchased, which led to discrepancies. Now, staff weigh raw materials on digital scales, and the inventory data and costs are automatically updated to the ERP system, eliminating errors due to manual input.

Finally, migrating critical workloads onto the AWS Cloud has allowed the IT team to meet the management team’s recovery time objective of 1 day. Previously, Kirana Megatara had limited disaster recovery capabilities with its on-premises infrastructure and any form of system failure would have taken up to 1 month to resolve.

CDT ran a Proof of Concept (POC) for Kirana Megatara, which gave the organization the confidence to migrate the rest of its SAP workloads onto the AWS Cloud. CDT completed the migration in 4 hours, with a further 3 hours dedicated to performance tests. The entire process from the POC to the actual migration took 60 days to complete.

The migration has saved the organization about 20 percent on hardware replacement costs, such as for server racks and storage. These often took up to 1 month to procure and install, and entailed 8 maintenance hours a month.

Kirana Megatara has redirected these operational and time savings towards other areas of digital innovation. For example, the organization is currently experimenting with Internet of Things technologies to predict hardware failures and facilitate maintenance.

“Our newfound cloud and disaster recovery capabilities provide peace of mind as we grow our business. The industrial sector is Indonesia’s largest economic contributor. However, when it comes to digital transformation, the sector lags behind its counterparts in other countries. Working with CDT and AWS has helped us accelerate our digitization efforts and gain a definitive edge over our competition,” said Hendrik Iriawan Saputra, general manager of IT at Kirana Megatara.