Enables migration and consolidation in a short timeframe

EagleBurgmann Japan is the competent contact for industrial sealing technology and associated services in Japan for more than 50 years. Approximately 800 employees in Niigata factory and 6 regional sales of fices and service centers guarantee customer-oriented and rapid services.

EagleBurgmann Japan aims to build a new core system that integrates core business operations with ERP (mission-critical tasks), CRM (customer relationship management), and PLM (technology-related documentation management) systems as its core. They aim to revise their existing workflow, facilitate data utilization, and then accelerate further automation and implement DX through seamless linkage between systems.

The first step in this project as to upgrade the core system that serves as the DX foundation from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA and integrate it into a single instance of Eagle Industry’s global system. The basic idea in integration is the idea of “fit to standard.” However, there was a requirement to migrate as much of the necessary data as possible, which led the project to be driven by the following three policies.

Takuya Ito, Chief of Data Control Section at EagleBurgmann IT Department, reflects on the first policy of integration, that when transferring systems to Eagle Industry’s SAP S/4HANA, any customizations and programs for SAP exclusive to EagleBurgmann should be kept to a minimum. The following policy was that any unnecessary master data should not be migrated. Lastly, the third policy was that all transaction data must be tagged for migration.

EagleBurgmann Japan started core business operations on the SAP system in 2013. As a result of continued add-on development to meet business improvement requirements, system operation had become more complicated and costly.

There are three main ways to approach migration to SAP S/4HANA: “Greenfield,” in which a new system is built, “Brownfield,” in which ECC is converted without any changes, and lastly, “BLUEFIELD™.” BLUEFIELD™ is a method of changing business processes but making effective use of past data by selecting and modifying data before migration.

Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Head of IT Department at EagleBurgmann, retells the deciding factor in selecting BLUEFIELD™ for this project, saying, “We decided that the BLUEFIELD™approach was optimal in that it would allow us to continue utilizing the vast amount of data accumulated to date while revising the workflow of the system.”

To delve further into the context of this migration, in order to revise the workflow of the system, it was necessary to adapt the master, customization, and transaction data associated with EagleBurgmann to Eagle Industry’s system and code architecture.

With this in mind, the BLUEFIELD™ approach was the best choice for this project to achieve data migration while converting code values for items, suppliers, accounts, and other customization-related code values such as voucher types, including historical data. However, at the time when they were contemplating the various methods, BLUEFIELD™ had not yet been used in many cases. In addition, there was a period of uncertainty due to the fact that the work would be done fully remotely.

Kashiwagi summarizes: “That’s why we held thorough discussions with Fujitsu and its partners to resolve the issues, transcending the barriers between the companies. As our understanding of the characteristics of the BLUEFIELD™ approach deepened, including the identification of key data conversion requirements and the creation of post-migration verification points and scenarios, we gradually began to feel a positive effect.”

A major hurdle in moving forward with the project was to minimize downtime for the transition as much as possible. Initially, downtime during the actual migration period was estimated to take about one week. However, given the constraints of the business, the integration into the global instance of Eagle Industries, which has multiple locations in Asia, Europe, and other regions, needed to be completed within 44 hours.

Three SAP systems were used in this instance integration. The first is EagleBurgmann’s SAP ECC, which is the data migration source. The second is Eagle Industry’s SAP S/4HANA, which was already in operation and was the destination for data migration. Lastly, the third was the SAP system that controlled the data migration process, located between the first two systems.

Ito: “To achieve data migration in a short period of time, we had to adopt a BLUEFIELD™ approach and assign optimal server resources to each system with clearly defined procedures. I think the secret to our success was that we had detailed discussions in advance and were able to flexibly optimize server resources by lifting them up to the cloud before the project started.”

The project was a collaborative ef fort between Fujitsu, their application maintenance vendor, and Eagle Industries’ IT department. As a result of the progress made while clarifying issues and goals in advance, the migration of more than 1,500 SAP tables was completed in 25 hours during the actual integration. The system integration was achieved without impacting the business.

Ito: “The adoption of BLUEFIELD™ and the fact that we were able to optimize data migration procedures and server resources in advance through migration rehearsals produced positive results.” The integrated system is now able to share and leverage the resources of Eagle Industries’ IT members and maintenance vendors, not to mention bolstered governance.

“By revising the workflow, we they were able to reduce the number of addons by more than 90%, and the utilization of standard SAP functions increased by about 1.5x, making the system more responsive to future version upgrades,” Ito says emphatically of the benefits after the integration.

With the success of this project, EagleBurgmann’s group-wide ERP, CRM, PLM, and other systems will be linked together and re-booted to achieve DX through further automation. The next challenge is the integration of the Asia-Pacific and Indian instances. Kashiwagi spoke of his expectations for Fujitsu in the future, saying, “We do not have any SAP experts in our company, so I think Fujitsu’s abundant human resources and high-quality project management helped us to achieve this success. We look forward to greater backup in the future, based on their experience and expertise, to tackle areas that we were not able to get to this time due to time constraints. We hope for Fujitsu’s continued support as we accelerate our Group’s DX.

After this project, EagleBurgmann aims to build up a DX system. Fujitsu will continue to provide support with its solid technical and project management capabilities, which are well versed in SAP systems.