A subsidiary of a multi-billion-dollar oil and gas major had built an extensive UK service station network with forecourt and shop development. When they acquired an additional refinery, integration questions arose.
The parent company used J.D. Edwards. The refinery used SAP. Conventional wisdom dictated migrating the refinery to J.D. Edwards for consistency.
But the IT Manager questioned this approach. The refining operations were separate from retail and distribution. The refinery team had SAP skills. Migration would be expensive with little business benefit.
The refinery was running ancient SAP R/3 4.6. Extended support was expiring, forcing an upgrade. The client had out-sourced hardware support to a third party. But the new owner wanted to bring this in-house.
This required migrating from SUN Solaris to IBM iSeries AS400 operating system.
The IT Manager’s team decided on the fastest, lowest-cost approach. Migrate to new hardware first, then upgrade SAP later in the year. Sensible. Pragmatic. Cost-effective.
Everything That Could Go Wrong, Did
The team was small. Business imperatives were high. The IT Manager knew these projects had a habit of hitting unforeseen difficulties. He chose Pivot for the most experienced external support available.
His instincts proved prophetic. The perfect storm hit immediately.
The SAP version was so old migration tools didn’t support it. SAP’s migration kit catered for moves from Oracle database engine version 8. But the refinery was running the more recent version 9.
Standard migration procedures were useless.
IBM iSeries servers were so new that they wouldn’t support parts of SAP R/3 version 4.6. The hardware was too advanced for the ancient software.
Old software, new hardware. No compatibility. No standard solution.
Two incompatibility problems would have been manageable. But they were compounding each other. Ancient SAP version. Wrong Oracle database version. Brand new hardware that rejected old software.
Every standard approach failed. Every migration tool was useless. The sensible strategy had hit a technical perfect storm.
Our SAP-accredited consultant rose to the challenge. He engineered solutions that didn’t previously exist.
First, he compiled a bespoke migration kit to overcome the Oracle database engine version mismatch. Standard tools wouldn’t work, so he built custom ones.
Second, he built new installation routines to overcome the IBM hardware newness issue. The hardware and software had never been designed to work together, so he made them compatible.
Pivot provided a test system following SAP best practice. Previously, the refinery operated only production and development systems. That was risky.
Changes couldn’t be tested before going live. Pivot eliminated this risk by implementing proper testing infrastructure.
The system migrated successfully with SAP’s ongoing support approval. What started as a technical nightmare became a success story.
The bespoke solutions worked. The new hardware supported the old software. The Oracle database version mismatch was resolved. The test system eliminated future risks.
Pivot delivered custom engineering that turned incompatibilities into compatibilities.
Pivot proved that unforeseen problems require unforeseen solutions. And exceptional expertise to deliver them.
