Orica
Innovation is a major part of Orica’s strategy, creating, developing and delivering mining and civil blasting and ground control solutions that help its customers be more productive and manage their critical risks. Its commitment to the safety, health and wellbeing of its workforce and customers, the environment, and the communities in which it operates underpins everything it does.
Working in highly regulated markets, with complex and potentially dangerous products, Orica must be in total control of the vast array of documentation and supporting content required to maintain safety, adherence to procedures, quality, manage risk, high standards of customer service and employee welfare.
Content Enabling Enterprise-Wide SAP Transformation Project
Following both organic growth and numerous acquisitions and divestments, made over many years, Orica’s SAP landscape had become overly complex. With dozens of core business processes implemented in different ways across the 57 countries it operates in, the decision was taken to undertake a global transformation project to standardize processes and to take better control of documentation and other unstructured content.
Chris Crozier, Orica’s Chief Information Officer explained further, “We had content managed across many different applications and content silos. This often made it challenging to identify the most current version of a document. We determined we needed a reliable, single source of the truth.”
Orica set out with an overarching mantra for the project of “simple, standard and single SAP”, or “4S”, and any additional capability not available within SAP had to adhere to this. Before embarking on the program, Orica had used SAP Document Management System (DMS), however it was not able to provide the level of governance and accessibility required, consequently an alternative solution was needed. Added to this, unstructured content was often stored in Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint and network file shares, only exacerbating problems further. A new solution to complement SAP was needed.
“Orica had already been using OpenText Content Server to manage our health and safety documentation, group policy and procedure documents, so we investigated using OpenText for our 4S program too,” said Crozier, “Thanks to its deep integration to SAP and roadmap alignment, we chose OpenText™ Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions to best enable us to align to our vision of a single view of content, managed in one place.”
Working in Partnership to Implement the 4S Vision
Implemented in phases, the complex, business-led project required the right mix of skills, knowledge and experience, focusing on implementing standardized business processes across 57 countries of operation. The driving principle being that every country should use the same business process, using globally common master data, measuring processes and outcomes in the same way. The OpenText platform provides the required multi-lingual capabilities required to achieve this.
Cathy Christy, Orica’s Head of IT Applications explains “To achieve our goals, we see OpenText and SAP as key enablers to make standardized processes a reality for Orica. As well as these critical solutions, we also required the right people and so we engaged Chrome Consulting, experienced OpenText and SAP consultants, who have provided invaluable guidance and consulting services throughout the project”.
The 4S program has been implemented in phases, the second of which included the deployment of OpenText™ Extended ECM for SAP® SuccessFactors to manage HR documentation for Orica’s 12,000 employees. Employees, managers, recruiters, HR and others now have access to standardized processes with all documentation securely managed by OpenText.
The third phase saw Orica move to a single SAP S/4HANA instance, with further integration of OpenText to all core business processes for unstructured content.
“As well as OpenText Extended ECM, we also implemented OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) for SAP® Solutions,” added Christy, “This enables us to manage the complete source to purchase to pay process, consistently and efficiently, within SAP and OpenText, anywhere we operate, in 8 languages for users.”
Orica followed a cloud-first strategy and determined early in the project that it would deploy such a large, complex, enterprise solution on cloud infrastructure partly due to the global nature of Orica’s manufacturing operations, many of which are in remote areas with low bandwidth. Microsoft Azure provided the required high availability, disaster recovery and scalability needed. OpenText Professional Services provided additional, value-added services in areas such as performance analysis and tuning, to ensure maximum performance and business benefit.
In keeping with the standard element of the 4S principle, customization of the solution was limited, except where necessary, for example around master data governance and integration to custom financial approval workflows, which was expected for an organization as large and complex as Orica.
