Innovation and transformation are bywords for Orica as the business moves toward a low-emission, technology-driven future. On climate action, the multinational operation aims to reduce its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 45% in FY2030 over FY2019 and move to 100% renewable electricity by 2040. On the technology front, the business has committed to a transformation program designed to modernize its IT infrastructure, enhance its operational efficiency, and unlock new data-driven insights. "This program is designed to simplify and standardize our hosting footprint, allowing us to become more nimble in how we operate and ultimately bring value to the business," said Rob Stocker, Senior Manager, Core Technology, Orica.

This exercise incorporated a rigorous evaluation to identify the best infrastructure option for its SAP enterprise resource planning system. Selecting the right cloud hyperscaler was extremely important to Orica, as this system impacts about 7,000 team members and provides fundamental support to the entire value chain, enabling the company's business activities in over 100 countries. Critical tasks enabled by SAP include demand and supply planning, inventory management, asset management, and finance and human resources processes. 

The selected infrastructure provider had to fulfill the strict requirements of a range of stakeholders within the business. These included performance and availability that provided a high-quality experience for Orica's global workforce, system integrity, and backup capability, and cost-effectiveness. 

A visit from Orica's leadership team to the Google Cloud campus in the United States in 2023, and the announcement in May that year of an expansion of the Google Cloud-SAP partnership to build open data and AI for enterprises, opened the eyes of Orica's executives to new opportunities. "We saw the potential benefits of moving our SAP workloads to Google Cloud, including the access to data, analytics, and innovative services this partnership could bring," said Orica's Group Chief Information Officer, Rachael Sandel.

Google Cloud's close partnership with SAP, and its superiority across most technical and business criteria, prompted Orica to select the cloud provider's infrastructure services to run its enterprise resource planning system. "In the hyperscaler hosting business case, we took into consideration the core elements of cost, optimization, and efficiency, and the potential to access data and analytics services designed for SAP workloads," said Sandel. "We also looked at how some infrastructure-based solutions worked in different ways to those we had, and how this could support our transformation objectives." 

SAP's status as a core system for Orica made a pain-free implementation of the new hyperscale cloud infrastructure essential to the business's continued smooth operations. Sandel led the project and, because of the risk inherent in moving the organization's most critical workload to another hyperscaler, secured full support for the move from the organization's key executives. "As an IT organization, we wanted to make sure we got the migration right as SAP is a critical system–there could be no impact on the business throughout this process," said Stocker. 

After an 18-month engagement with the Google Cloud account team that had built trust and confidence in the cloud hyperscaler's ability to deliver on its promises, Orica engaged Google Cloud's Professional Services Organization (PSO) to deliver the migration project. 

PSO completed the project end-to-end in just 18 weeks including creating technical design documentation for the target state of SAP on Google Cloud and consulting and providing input into operational specifics such as storage and load balancing rules. "What we appreciated about the PSO team was that they worked in partnership with us," said Sandel. "They were an extension of our team and worked with us on assessment and planning, comparing current state to future state, and suggesting ways to optimize or right-size in that target state architecture. They were also very heavily involved in the architecture design and in validating changes."   

The move to Google Cloud also allowed Orica to improve its backup processes and improve the resilience of its environment. "The Google Cloud team brought its backup and disaster recovery service, which was superior to our incumbent processes, into discussions with us," said Sandel. Orica seized the opportunity to redesign its backups and improve recovery point and recovery time objectives. Once the organization went live with the Google Cloud solution, its massive SAP HANA environment backed up in just minutes rather than the several hours required prior to the solution's deployment.