Leading Australian explosives maker Orica is now well into the third release of a massive SAP transformation known as the 4S Program which will consolidate its global operations onto a single platform. Orica is the world’s largest provider of commercial explosives and innovative blasting systems to the mining, quarrying construction, and oil and gas markets.

Taking over three years to implement, 4S – which stands for Simple Standard Single SAP – incorporates multiple languages and country-specific legislative requirements impacting more than 3,290 documented business processes.

Worker safety is the top priority for Orica; one of the ways it is improving safety is by ensuring the latest and correct documentation, including procedures and instructions, is easily accessible to maintenance crews.

Orica has implemented OpenText’s Extended Enterprise Content Management (XECM) solution integrating document management with asset maintenance processes.

To improve both safety and productivity, Orica engaged Chrome Consulting to support the simplification and standardisation of these processes. Chrome has been working on 4S since the beginning of the project to help integrate enterprise content management into the maintenance-based processes using Open Text solutions.

The XECM solution will support Orica’s business through the provision of accurate and up-to-date documents while staff are conducting complex maintenance activities. This will reduce risk and support Orica’s commitment to the safety, health and wellbeing of its employees and customers. The approach is complemented by the XECM for Success Factors Solution, implemented as part of a previous release of the 4S Program.

The size of the scope, immense geographical coverage and multiple time zones has made the 4S Program a unique project from Chrome Consulting’s perspective. Chrome has been heavily involved in end-to-end business processes including, ‘recruit to hire to terminate’, ‘source to pay’ and the complete asset lifecycle allowing the company to showcase its expertise in the OpenText solutions for Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) and XECM.

In the source to pay process, Chrome has helped Orica to deliver one of the leading implementations of VIM, automating invoice processing across 25 countries. As a global template, it standardises the capture and approval of invoices in a global context. This will see considerable cost savings through a reduction in the time to process invoices, full visibility of bottlenecks in the invoice processing streams, as well as the ability to reduce these bottlenecks in the coming months.

The platform is all cloud based, with S/4 Hana hosted in Azure. The 4S Program will reduce risk, improve governance and decision-making and allow tighter alignment with the organisational structure and operating model.

“A project with such a wide scope like 4S requires a very tight collaboration between many vendors, and between the vendors and Orica. In Chrome, we had a trusted partner, who delivered to its commitments each and every time, not just in spite of the expected project pressure, but also the exceptional circumstances 2020 posed to us all,” said Orica’s CTO, Gabriela Azzali.

Chrome Consulting’s CEO Mark Frear welcomed the opportunity to work with Orica on the project, saying it was a major transformation exercise with global reach, with the core release deployed on a single go-live date.

“A multi-lingual project is always complex for content management,” said Mr Frear.

“VIM was implemented to automate invoice processing in 28 different languages with the associated country invoice templates. We had a project team based in Australia, supporting the large Orica project team in Singapore and were all able to successfully align to meet the go-live date in July this year in the midst of a global pandemic,” he said.

Chrome Consulting has been working with Orica since 2015 and is now moving to a support role on the 4S Program.