Elders Australia is putting its faith in a private cloud platform from HP as it embarks on a migration to a SAP and overhauls its enterprise applications, document management and collaboration environment.

The migration to SAP from a 20 year old IBM iSystem (AS/400) environment will be undertaken in a series of stages over the next four years, with the first deployment in March 2012 comprising financials, HR and Indirect Procurement.

Shaun Hughes, CIO of Elders Australia, said the 172-year-old rural services and automotive company has signed a seven-year infrastructure and applications services agreement with HP.

Under the agreement, Elders will use cloud technology to cost effectively deploy its enterprise technology refresh program – Project Connect.

“We have been going through a fairly significant business transformation over recent years,” said Hughes.

“This has been around three core pillars: customer centric sales, supply chain and capital management. Underpinning all of this is business process and reviewing our technology footprint.”

Both the new SAP deployment and Elders’ legacy applications will run on infrastructure hosted by HP in their cloud with automated processes managing the infrastructure and environment.

“As we migrate our legacy iSystem and bespoke Wintel applications to SAP, our philosophy is about keeping a central record, getting that data back into central data warehouse,” said Hughes.

“We will ensure all docs are scanned and stored digitally so they can be shared around across the whole of the company in 400 locations.”

In the initial stages, SAP’s core document management functionality is seen as sufficient, although this will be reviewed as the project evolves.

Elders also has some local solutions for document management and storage, it uses the locally developed DvTDM drawing and document management software for its insurance division and invoice processing.

“These will still continue to have a role to play considering the legacy footprint and the various joint venture businesses we are involved in,” said Hughes.

“We are not going to rip out old technology that still has a place. Business change is a significant issue and we are going to minimise that where we can.

While the Elders technology refresh will aim to automate business processes where possible, in some cases the nature of longstanding practices will limit their potential.

For example, at a stock saleyard in remote Australia, the industry practice is to manage record sales in triplicate via a written document.

“In some case we can automate the process but in other cases we still use handwritten documents which require data entry at local branch level, As we go through this design phase we are looking at how we can use a range of technologies related to job role, to simplify but work within constraints of how we operate.

“The triplicate form may still make sense but we may look at options such as data capture via a smartpen linked to mobile device to speed up the process flow and have manual validation.”

“Outsourcing to HP is a core part of our transformation program,” said Hughes. 

“HP’s cloud will provide us with a robust infrastructure and service delivery model that enables us to scale up for each of our program releases, and the applications methodologies and tools HP brings to the table enable us to de-risk the legacy development components of our build.”

HP will use products from its HP Software suite to synchronise Elders’ technology infrastructure with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Version 3 service management framework. To prepare for a cloud environment, HP will refresh Elders’ hardware with BladeSystem servers, HP Storage and ESL E-series Tape Libraries.

In addition, HP will deliver Workplace Services for all of the company’s computing devices such as desktop and notebook PCs, handheld devices and printers.

HP will deliver these infrastructure and applications services from HP global delivery centres in Australia and the Philippines