BHP taps Azure to keep to its ERP transformation timeline

BHP has made the shift from ECC to S/4HANA for its 1SAP enterprise resource planning environment, with Azure cloud services playing an instrumental role in keeping the migration timeline intact.

Head of global applications and ERP Ganesh Muthusamy told the SAP NOW A/NZ summit yesterday that S/4HANA went live in April this year.

It now underpins BHP’s massive single-instance ERP environment, known as 1SAP, which is treated as an “asset” in the miner, in much the same way its mines are assets.

“Everything we do within the business is sitting in that one instance, whether it’s commodity trading, payroll, or contracting, so that one instance is a very large instance,” Muthusamy said.

“We use a lot of SAP products, so Ariba, Concur, Signavio are [also] all in that environment.”

Transformation of 1SAP kicked off not long after it went live in 2014, encompassing a data centre migration, adoption of the HANA database to underpin the ECC-based SAP environment, and then a migration into Azure cloud.

“We’ve been in the cloud now for about three years,” Muthusamy said.

“We’re quite comfortable that we’re in the cloud. We were apprehensive to let go of the control that we would have inside of our centre around our hardware etc, but working with Microsoft has been quite useful in making sure we’ve got a very stable SAP environment.”

Muthusamy said the decision to upgrade from SAP ECC to S/4HANA was made soon after the cloud move, and was completed in April this year.

“The business case was what we call an asset integrity business case, but it was [also] a transformation business case, especially for our finance function,” he said.

Muthusamy, who was speaking in a Microsoft-run session, said that BHP’s cloud move years earlier enabled it to navigate some last-minute challenges around data migration that could have delayed the go-live had BHP’s infrastructure options been different.

“We had a plan - [but] best-laid plans always fail on the first day of battle,” Muthusamy said.

“We needed a bunch of landscapes we needed to spin up to make sure that we were getting our data right.”

Landscapes in SAP are architectural groupings of servers or systems. A common landscape in SAP is a three-tier one, with systems for development, quality assurance and production, though there are many variations.

Muthusamy said that in the move from ECC to S/4HANA, BHP “needed to move the data into a new environment, and when we moved to that new environment, we were having some data issues.” 

“For that, we needed to spin up a whole bunch of landscapes to make sure that we were getting the end-to-end testing for each scenario of data issues,” he said.

“If we had to do that on-prem, we would have had to buy hardware. If you think about what that would have meant, it would have meant in most cases between a six-week delay if you’re lucky, to potentially a six-month delay, especially for some of the high compute infrastructure that you need. 

“The flexibility to actually spin up those instances quickly and spin them down when we don’t need them was quite important in this space. 

“We spun up over 20 landscapes during our ERP transformation to S/4.”

AI use cases

Muthusamy indicated that BHP is examining options to feed data held in its SAP system into generative AI models, in circumstances where a business case can be mounted.

“The SAP environment has got the best curated data that you’re ever going to have to get AI working,” he said.

“When you really think about it, you’ve got this data that’s sitting inside our ERP system and then connecting it back to a generative AI environment, I think we’re on the precipice of something great.”

SAP and Microsoft are collaborating to bring to market joint generative AI propositions, with BHP monitoring those developments.

Muthusamy suggested that AI could play a future role in BHP’s shared services operations, “to improve service delivery to our assets”.

The prospect of an SAP-fed Copilot is also of interest. Muthusamy noted BHP is running its own trials of Microsoft Copilot, which had brought some “personal productivity” benefits.

“I was [recently] on leave, and I was able to just go in [to Copilot] and say, ‘Tell me what happened during the week’, and it kind of gave it to me succinctly, saved me two or three hours,” he said.

Muthusamy declined to comment on-stage about whether BHP’s future plans may lead it to ‘RISE with SAP’, the name SAP uses for an “AI-powered cloud ERP” that is based on S/4HANA cloud private edition.

He backed the miner’s current SAP platform, and said BHP is working with SAP on future plans.

“We’ve got a digital core that works for us. We now need to figure out a way to make sure that we use this core and these foundations to accelerate and leapfrog certain things,” he said.

“We have a roadmap that thinks through that, and we’re working very closely with SAP on how they can help us accelerate some of those roadmaps and those values. 

“What we’re very clear about is we’re not looking at whole-of-system transformations per se. We want to make sure the transformations are connected back to a business case. That’s actually our strategy. 

“Finance is very excited about some of the innovations that are coming in, and we will go through it on a business case by business case [basis].”

Muthusamy also suggested that BHP has interest in future high memory Azure instances.

"We’ve been pushing for [Microsoft] to get that very high memory infrastructure to host some of our workloads and what we do," he said.