Australia Department of Defence Undergoes Country's Largest SAP Upgrade

Despite multiple project risks, the Department of Defence successfully upgraded one of Australia’s largest SAP environments by partnering with CSC Australia. In a team effort with CSC as systems integrator and great assistance by the Defence team, the project achieved a smooth delivery.

With a budget of $22 billion, and a centralized financial system for hundreds of locations across the country, the Department of Defence has one of the largest and most complex SAP environments in Australia. In 2005, realizing support for its SAP R/3 financial system would soon expire, Defence started planning for the major transition required to upgrade to a new SAP release.

The upgrade presented significant systems integration challenges. With over 200 locations, 5,000 users and the requirement for functional changes, Defence CIO Peter Lambert knew this would involve risk.

Unmatched SAP experience

In selecting CSC Australia as their systems integration partner, Defence chose a highly qualified and experienced team. CSC had been a SAP partner for 25 years, with more than 350 SAP consultants in Australia, and many hundreds more around the globe. CSC provides the department with SAP support, ECC5 upgrades, and integration services to SAP customers in manufacturing, government and logistics enterprises.

Business advantages quickly became apparent. CSC consultants, who had a minimum of eight years’ SAP experience, demonstrated a deep knowledge of SAP applications and clearly understood the issues around getting Defence’s back-end systems in tune with the upgrade schedule.

Phased approach mitigates risk

The functional changes Defence required would affect document splitting, fund accounting and funds management. To mitigate the risk of delivering the technical upgrade together with these functional enhancements, the Defence Project Board endorsed a two-stage approach for the project, splitting the technical work away from the functional changes. This bought extra time for a more thorough functional blueprint.

The plan was to complete the technical upgrade over the first 12 months, leaving the remaining 12 months to conclude the functional implementation, data conversion (with three trial runs), comprehensive testing and support/warranty.

Importantly, both the Stage 1 and Stage 2 blueprints were completed in the first 12 months. Doing this early in the project life cycle reduced the impact on business. This allowed more time for process change and minimized overall risk, as all the design constraints were considered before realization activities in Stage 2 started. In addition, to ensure Defence experienced a smooth cut-over at each go-live, CSC included an allowance for special support for the first month of operation in Stage 1 and Stage 2.

Further reducing risk, CSC used proven project management methodologies, including its own Catalyst methodology and SAP’s own ASAP methodology and tools. This helped keep the upgrade on track, identifying the tasks required and providing implementation tools to assist project managers and team members. As a result, Defence benefited from a high quality integration of the SAP product and minimal adverse effect to current in-house business systems and operations.

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