Increased Operational Efficiency for Shyam Metallics with Implementation of “SAP on AWS”

Shyam Metallics are a leading integrated metal producing company based in India with a focus on Long Steel Products and Ferro Alloys. They have a consistent track record of delivering operating profitability, and since the commencement of operations in Fiscal 2005, and have delivered a positive EBITDA in each of the Fiscals. As of March 31, 2020, they are one of the leading players in terms of pellet capacity and the fourth largest player in the Sponge Iron industry in terms of sponge iron industry capacity in India (Source: CRISIL Report).

Shyam Metallics manufacturing includes captive power plants with an aggregated installed capacity of 227 MW as of December 31,2020. Their Sambalpur manufacturing plant caters to customers in Southern and western regions of India whereas our Jamuria and Mangalpur manufacturing plants caters to customers in Northern and Eastern regions of India.

With its dominant expansion its able to demonstrate Shyam Metallics’ commitment to innovation and growth within the metal production industry.

• Shyam Metallics initially operated its SAP ECC system from a third-party Data Center Infrastructure. However, as the company expanded, the need for a more agile and scalable infrastructure became apparent. 

  The existing on-premises setup was cumbersome and lacked the scalability required to support the company’s growth trajectory. Recognizing the significance of data-driven decision-making in their competitive industry, Shyam Metallics sought access to real-time data and insights to drive strategic planning and operational efficiency.

   

  Unfortunately, their legacy systems posed significant obstacles to harnessing the full potential of their data assets, and their attempts to migrate independently to SAP S4 faced multiple challenges.

   

  • Data Migration Complexity: Migrating data from ECC to S/4HANA is complex due to differences in data structures, tables, and data models between the two systems. Thorough data cleansing, transformation, and mapping are required to align with the new S/4HANA data model.

   

  • Securing data and infrastructure: The existing infrastructure lacked robust security measures to mitigate data loss or downtime risks, impacting the company’s ability to focus on core operations with confidence.

   

  • System Downtime and Business Continuity: Initial migration resulted in SAP system downtime, impacting business operations. Ensuring minimal downtime and uninterrupted business continuity were critical for a successful migration.

   

  • 3rd Party/Partners Integration: Shyam Metallics was facing challenges with bank integration, a complex and demanding process. Several difficulties have arisen in the integration with banks that require resolution.

   

  The existing infrastructure lacked automated backup options, scalability, reliability, and disaster recovery capabilities, hampering continuous availability and uptime. The hosting site required compliance enhancements for backups and disaster recovery.

• Configuring the SAP on AWS infrastructure involved several key steps. Here is a high-level solution approach we took for Shyam Metallics for configuring the SAP on AWS. 
  • Planning and Architecture Design
  • Network & Connectivity
  • Infrastructure Provisioning
  • SAP Installation & Configuration
  • Data Migration & Integration
  • Security & Compliance

   

  Some of the key technical aspects which we undertook during the implementation were:

  • Workmates team provisioned the SAP instances based on the BSAP Notes updated to 28th November 2021 for the recommended sizing.Working with Workmates, the Shyam Metalics implemented SAP S/4HANA on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2) memory-optimized c5.16xlarge instances in a highly available architecture spanning two Availability Zones.

   

  • We provisioned an isolated network i.e., VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) with proper security and firewalls (AWS In-built). All server’s and other resources were placed in the private subnet, wherein using AWS Mumbai region for low network latency.

   

  • The company also began using AWS IPsec VPN to establish a private connection to AWS, giving Shyam employees seamless access to SAP systems.

   

  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage users and authorizations to aws access.

   

  • Workmates team also provisioned the Sandbox environment to migrate and test the SAP ECC to SAP S4 system.

   

  • We also provisioned access to AWS Systems Manager in case there is any loss of RDP/SSH credentials for the provisioned instances.

   

  • In order to simulate proper traffic handling we used an Application Load Balancer. The ALB endpoint served incoming requests on to the application server.

   

  • All monitoring are available using AWS Enterprise tool CloudWatch. Preliminary backup mechanism will involve native backup on the VM itself and later pushed to S3.

  All the infra and DB backup will be stored on s3 storage service with 15 days retention and can be accessible at any point of time. We’ll enable system, logs and DB logs in the CW Logs and copy logs to the S3 bucket for archiving

Shyam Metallics SAP application was successfully deployed on AWS environment ready to handle scale and growing demands.

• The migration of SAP S/4HANA to AWS has furnished the essential scalability needed both presently and in the foreseeable future. The ability to seamlessly scale compute and storage resources on demand has proven instrumental in facilitating critical enhancements, thereby bolstering their capacity to sustain and foster business expansion.
• This migration has also led to a 60 percent performance increase and 99.99% Uptime and Improves Business Continuity with Migration to SAP on AWS
• Migrating critical workloads onto the AWS Cloud has allowed the IT team to meet the management team’s recovery time objective of 6hrs from a month
• The migration has saved the organization about 20 percent on hardware replacement costs, such as for server racks and storage. These often took up to 1 month to procure and install, and entailed 8 maintenance hours a month.

• AWS IAM role-based access control to restrict users to only the required resources.
• Deep visibility into API calls are maintained through AWS Cloud Trail, including who, what, and from where calls were made. All user related activities are tracked and logged.
• For any Administrative task Remote user have need to connect to VPN client for accessing the servers. All the RDP/SSH port are bound with OpenVPN server, also default ports will be changed to the custom port.
• The DB ports are accessible only from the Application containers and are restricted using Security Group.
• All the container workloads are under the private subnets, the Fiori application are exposed using the Application Load Balancer. SSL listeners has been setup for ALB and certificate has been issued using AWS ACM.