Sacyr: Constructing a unified business resource platform with SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud

About Sacyr

Founded in 1986, Sacyr is a Spanish construction company that operates in 30 countries worldwide. Committed to innovation and international expansion, it is part of the IBEX 35 stock market index.

Industries: Other
Location: Spain

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Sistel

Sistel provides companies with complete IT solutions including infrastructure, storage management, and data analysis, enabling them to transform technological change into competitive advantages.

Sacyr chose Google Cloud for its SAP S/4HANA implementation to build a more flexible and unified business resource planning system that offers greater oversight, data traceability, and efficiency.

Google Cloud results

  • Enables fast and easy scaling of SAP environments to dynamically respond to business needs
  • Powers a unified system that’s simple to roll out to new locations and projects
  • Offers a responsive toolset that has improved ICT team efficiency by 15%

Provisions SAP environments in minutes

Quality public services require quality infrastructure. From the Panama Canal, Las Pedrizas motorway in Malaga, and Pumarejo Bridge in Colombia, to Italy’s Concession Pedemontana-Veneta and Florida and Texas in the US, plus more than 60 healthcare centers built in Spain, Portugal, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Angola, and Cape Verde, global construction group Sacyr has been helping to build services for citizens since 1986. The company employs almost 38,000 people worldwide.

Besides working on all kinds of civil construction projects, Sacyr also provides services through its Sacyr Concessions, Sacyr Industrial, and Sacyr Services divisions. Sacyr Services, for instance, offers clients complete environmental solutions to satisfy all their needs, from facility management, maintenance, and cleaning to energy, food services, and water treatment.

“To remain competitive, we have to manage increasingly demanding requirements for speed, flexibility, and scalability. The key to our business environment is flexibility, in order to manage multiple divisions and short- and long-term projects, as well as growing through acquisition over various geographical locations.”

Francisco Gonzalo, CIO, Sacyr Group

Previously, Sacyr didn’t have a unified financial process model that worked across its businesses. In order to improve the management and traceability of key business information, the group decided to build a unified ERP system by hosting SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud, which it calls BAMBU.

“To remain competitive, we have to manage increasingly demanding requirements for speed, flexibility, and scalability,” explains Francisco Gonzalo, CIO at Sacyr Group. “The key to our business environment is flexibility, in order to manage multiple divisions and short- and long-term projects, as well as growing through acquisition over various geographical locations.”

Creating a scalable environment across divisions

Before BAMBU, Sacyr employed different models based on various technological solutions in its divisions. “We lacked a unique set of data at the group level,” says Francisco Gonzalo. “We needed a unified solution to define, analyze, and prototype our economic and financial processes, and we wanted to implement it across all our business areas in a rapid, scalable way.” In order to improve data traceability and create a common data governance model, Sacyr launched the BAMBU project in mid-2017. After an evaluation period, it chose Google Cloud for its new SAP S/4HANA landscape to gain complete flexibility to define, dimension, and manage technical infrastructure, as well as improve efficiency, and deploy faster.

The initial deployment phase encompassed two divisions, Sacyr Holdings and Sacyr Concessions. Using Compute Engine instances and a virtual private cloud (VPC), the BAMBU infrastructure now hosts three SAP S/4HANA groups: development, test and integration, and production. Persistent Disk provides high-performance block storage, with the snapshot function offering regular backups.

By deploying SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud, Sacyr is able to provision its infrastructure quickly, in minutes not weeks, according to the development of its activities in new countries and the beginning and ending of engineering or services projects.

“Technological scalability is crucial for meeting customer requirements, such as fulfilling deadlines or complying with environmental regulations,” says Francisco Gonzalo. “Thanks to the ability to easily scale our resources up and down on Compute Engine, we use only the required computing processes, and we only pay for what we provision. We don’t need to worry about updates, because moving to a new processor is as easy as a click.”

“More than 24 virtual machines, 240 virtual cores, and 1.5 terabytes were scaled, provisioned, and fully managed. Thanks to the ease of working with Google Cloud, we estimate that we were able to accelerate the delivery of the project by 20%.”

Francisco Gonzalo, CIO, Sacyr Group

Gaining expertise, building confidence with SISTEL and Google Cloud

Sacyr chose to work with implementation partner SISTEL in order to gain expertise on cloud-based infrastructure and accelerate its own team’s confidence in using the tools.

“The aim of this ambitious project was to transform the way we work,” says Francisco Gonzalo. “We were looking for a technology provider to build a real partnership with and share a commitment for the future. The whole collaboration is a great example of good change management and effective team communication.”

With the help of SISTEL and support from the Google Cloud team, the project was delivered on time and on budget in 18 months. “More than 24 virtual machines, 240 virtual cores, and 1.5 terabytes were scaled, provisioned, and fully managed,” says Francisco Gonzalo. “Thanks to the ease of working with Google Cloud, we estimate that we were able to accelerate the delivery of the project by 20%.”

“We are now able to easily define, scale, and manage our technical infrastructure including servers, storage, networking, and backup. The ability to provision an SAP environment in minutes really helps us to deliver, even with tight project deadlines.”

Francisco Gonzalo, CIO, Sacyr Group

Gaining efficiency and delivering on time

Implementing SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud has given Sacyr the increased flexibility and faster responsiveness it was looking for. “We are now able to easily define, scale, and manage our technical infrastructure including servers, storage, networking, and backup,” says Francisco Gonzalo. “The ability to provision an SAP environment in minutes really helps us to deliver, even with tight project deadlines.”

While it’s still too early to confirm Sacyr’s projected financial savings, the company has already seen an improvement of 15% in the technological and financial efficiency of its ICT team, which is able to provision environments more quickly and better adapt to the needs of the moment using its Google Cloud-based platform. This efficiency also translates into improvements in customer service for Sacyr’s clients, as the management of billing, offers, purchases, and orders are all impacted by the new system. “We now have a better platform, with better features, at a lower price, and this is already being reflected in our concession business in Spain,” says Francisco Gonzalo.

Sacyr is now continuing to roll out the BAMBU project to its other divisions and is confident that Google Cloud and SISTEL will help it to meet its new project objectives for the next phase of the implementation. “Working with Google Cloud, we know that our platform can evolve in seconds, and accommodate new technologies as they emerge on the market,” says Francisco Gonzalo. “We don’t need to plan in advance for system updates, and we have a robust path for growth.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Sacyr

Founded in 1986, Sacyr is a Spanish construction company that operates in 30 countries worldwide. Committed to innovation and international expansion, it is part of the IBEX 35 stock market index.

Industries: Other
Location: Spain

About Sistel

Sistel provides companies with complete IT solutions including infrastructure, storage management, and data analysis, enabling them to transform technological change into competitive advantages.