Cepsa

Cepsa Lights Up HANA Migration with Panaya

About
Cepsa

Compañía Española de Petróleos (Cepsa) is a large Spanish oil and gas company. With more than 10,000 employees and 26.9 billion euros in revenue, their ERP systems are complex. It operates at every stage of the hydrocarbon value chain: exploration and production of oil and gas, refining, distribution and marketing of crude oil and natural gas derivatives, biofuels, co-generation and electricity sales. Cepsa has a leading position in Spain and, through the progressive international expansion of its business, also operates in several continents and markets its products across the world.

CEPSA

“Panaya enabled a fast EHP upgrade that reduced our risk and was critical to our HANA migration.”

The Challenge

Over the past few years, Cepsa underwent a major global expansion. Different units had different processes, data was not optimized, and processing slowed down. Their ERP system started holding their business back. Running several EHP versions behind, they were stuck on ECC 6.0 EHP4. With only one single SAP integrated instance for all business areas, a large database, and more than 2,800 users, the complexity was getting out of hand.

“They had 9 million lines of custom code,” said Elsa Villalba Poncet, Account Manager at Techedge. “They needed to simplify their processes and reduce ERP response time so that the business could be more agile.”

Their existing database was insufficient to meet their future business goals so they needed a new solution. With 90% of their business running on one complex ERP system, they wanted to make one swift migration. They knew that in order to increase performance they needed to upgrade to the bleeding edge. They decided to migrate to ECC 6.0 EHP7 on HANA, SAP’s new in-memory relational database.

The Solution

Such a large migration is risky. As an early adopter to HANA, not many organizations had experience with HANA migrations. Cepsa’s system posed additional, unique challenges. Making changes to a single system, especially with new technology, is extremely risky.

Cepsa management had clearly defined goals, with a strict budget and defined timeline. Having a clear roadmap in the end-to-end migration from impact analysis and scoping to managing tests, both technical and UAT, was critical. They needed to understand the impact of changes. Insight into what to scope, what to test, and how to safely get there was essential. Luckily, Panaya  was there to help.

The Results

Thanks to Panaya, Cepsa was able to upgrade on time with zero risks and zero defects. Their entire HANA migration from planning to go-live took only six months.

Panaya helped Cepsa scope the plan to test only affected areas. By running the impact analysis, they were able to plan the migration and manage the outside testers. As a result, they identified 8,690 objects that were out-of-scope. This saved 15,045 hours over the course of the project.

Panaya helped Cepsa keep their domain knowledge in-house. Data wasn’t owned by external suppliers, but rather Cepsa. This makes it easier for them to be prepared for their next migration. “Panaya helped unify all of the processes and test cases in a single, reusable repository,” said Poncet. “It’s not in an Excel file, it’s in Panaya and everyone can access these particular processes.”

By organizing and centralizing data, hours were saved simply by avoiding tedious data collection and cumbersome reporting. By using Panaya, Cepsa and its outside contractors were able to ensure that everything that needed to be tested was.

Change with Confidence

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