Transforming Industry

14 15 ENERGY Real-time visibility from warehouse to doorstep TM International Logistics Limited (TMILL) needed to overhaul its SAP solutions after developing a range of in-house applications. A joint venture of Tata Steel Limited, NYK Holding (Europe) BV and IQ Martrad, with clients in dry bulk, containerized shipping, break bulk and project cargo, TMILL relies on SAP solutions to drive its logistics business processes, including financial accounting and consolidation, sales and procurement. However, a range of initiatives addressing aspects such as warehouse management, cargo-loading and customs clearance had left the company facing complex challenges. Abhishek Verma, Chief of IT at the company, explains: “In recent years, we’ve seen significant growth in demand for logistics solutions that show where consignments are in our global network in real time. Our in-house applications were developed at different times, to support different tactical requirements, and only a handful were interconnected. As a result, we lacked a single, integrated view of our business data.” Knowing that its on-premises SAP ERP applications would be unable to deliver supply chain insights at the required speed and scale, TMILL decided that enhanced analytics from SAP S/4HANA and the agility of the cloud would deliver the real-time services it was seeking. IBM Services enabled the company to move from SAP ERP on-premises to SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, with a solution that included human resource management capabilities. “This would offer us the performance we were targeting, and we could integrate data from our in-house applications to create a single, accurate and timely source of business data,” says Verma. IBM Services ran a HANA Impact Assessment during the ” We have a high performance, real-time engine capable of supporting the most demanding analytics use cases” vendor evaluation phase to determine which parts of the existing SAP ERP environment could be moved to the new platform, which had to be modified, and which could be removed. As the company was already using Microsoft Office 365 as its business productivity suite, Azure cloud was a natural choice for the new platform and would also make it easier to deliver single-sign-on capabilities for business users of the company’s Microsoft and SAP solutions. The implementation led to faster financial reporting, improving employee productivity. Meanwhile, accelerated SAP S/4HANA deployment led to reduced time-to-value. The high- availability cloud configuration enabled 24/7 uptime for SAP S/4HANA solutions. The IBM Services deployment of best-practice accelerators as part of the IBM SAP HANA Impact Assessment gave TM International Logistics a smooth, low-risk path to real- time analytics when deploying development and production environments in the cloud. Today, all members of the TMILL finance, sales and procurement teams use SAP S/4HANA to drive their day-to-day work. “With SAP S/4HANA at the heart of our business, we have a high-performance, real-time engine capable of supporting the most demanding analytics use cases,” says Verma. Read the full case study >