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EMC ACCELERATES BUSINESS OPERATIONS WITH SAP A New Model of Collaboration between Business and IT Drives EMC’s Global SAP Rollout

 

 

 

EMC WHITE PAPER

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ABSTRACT Learn how a $20-plus billion global technology company orchestrated a 27-month global rollout of a new SAP ERP system, culminating in a “big-bang” cutover to 8,000 users simultaneously across the globe. Signifying an unprecedented collaboration between EMC’s business units and IT, the SAP project is delivering substantial value across the enterprise. Early achievements include $11 million in cost savings, 20 times throughput increases between SAP and legacy applications, and dramatically faster and more efficient integrations of applications and new business acquisitions. The new SAP system runs on a fully virtualized Vblock converged infrastructure that has delivered major improvements in performance, efficiency and scalability over the legacy ERP environment. The paper also documents EMC’s best practices for adapting its business process to SAP, managing governance and change, and building an innovative Application Integration Cloud (AIC).

April 2013

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................ 3  A BURNING NEED FOR CHANGE ............................................................................................................. 4  AN ERP ROLLOUT ON A MASSIVE SCALE ................................................................................................ 5  UNPRECENTED BUSINESS AND IT COLLABORATION .............................................................................. 5  MAINTAINING THE CORE AT EVERY STAGE ............................................................................................ 5  A COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEM OF GOVERNANCE ....................................................................................... 7  PREPARING FOR THE BIG BANG ............................................................................................................ 7  A NEW PRIVATE CLOUD FOR SAP ........................................................................................................... 8  ACCELERATED PROJECT LIFECYCLE ....................................................................................................... 9  INNOVATION: APPLICATION INTEGRATION CLOUD ............................................................................ 10  KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS ..................................................................................................................... 11  BEST PRACTICES FOR THE ENTERPRISE ............................................................................................... 12  BUSINESS AND IT TRANSFORMATION ................................................................................................. 13  REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................ 13  

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Many enterprises wrestle with scaling their internal systems and processes to handle business growth. Large enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems often become complex from years of modifications and evolving needs of business. Yet when it comes to upgrading or implementing a new ERP system, companies historically have been plagued with huge budget overruns and long delays.

Faced with these challenges, EMC Corporation embarked on a journey to replace an aging and highly customized ERP system that had become an obstacle to rapid business growth and operational efficiency. Choosing SAP as its new ERP platform, EMC adopted a radically new approach for this project called PROPEL. Rather than mold SAP to existing business processes, EMC committed to adopting out-of-the-box SAP business processes and functionality, and customize only when absolutely necessary for competitive advantage.

Essential to this transformative change on both business as well as technology infrastructure was an unprecedented collaboration between EMC’s business units and IT, as well as sponsorship from the company’s senior executive management.

The speed and scope with which EMC, a $20-plus billion global enterprise, implemented a brand-new ERP system was remarkable. The SAP rollout ran for barely 27 months culminating in a “big bang” rollout to 8,000 global users simultaneously. The initiative involved a global team of 500 employees, consultants, systems integrators and other partners working from around the world. Together, team members deployed 20 SAP modules, integrated 65 legacy applications, and developed 620 unique objects while building one of the world’s largest fully virtualized SAP implementation and a new, innovative Application Integration Cloud (AIC).

One quarter after PROPEL’s go-live, EMC documented several system improvements, such as overall transaction throughput increasing by 20 times and sales orders processing in five minutes compared to 25 minutes. With a standard set of SAP business processes and streamlined application development, EMC can integrate new business acquisitions into the new ERP system in as little as two months compared to up to two years with its legacy solution. And with a completely virtualized, agile infrastructure, EMC estimates an initial $11 million in IT cost savings that will grow exponentially in the years ahead.

PROPEL has fundamentally changed the way EMC IT operates. It establishes a new model for how IT and the business collaborate to maximize enterprise value while driving more efficient and agile growth and ultimately competitive advantage.

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A BURNING NEED FOR CHANGE Over the last decade, EMC has transformed from a company focused on a single high-end information storage hardware product line to a global enterprise that manufactures and distributes hundreds of hardware and software solutions and delivers a wide range of professional services. At the same time, EMC’s partner and distributor networks and global manufacturing operations have grown dramatically and become more complex.

As this transformation occurred, EMC grew rapidly from $10 billion to $20-plus billion in annual revenues and more than doubled its number of employees to 46,200 (not including VMware). Its information infrastructure increased from 960 terabytes to 13 petabytes and transitioned to a remarkable 92 percent virtualized environment (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Case for Change

To keep pace with this massive growth and business change, EMC IT had repeatedly customized its legacy ERP infrastructure. With two million lines of custom code and hundreds of bolt-ons and application interfaces, EMC’s ERP environment had become overwhelmingly complex and difficult to maintain and scale. Even more concerning was the increasing difficulty involved with fulfilling high volumes of increasingly complex and custom orders, closing out the financial quarters and integrating the numerous businesses EMC has been acquiring.

It was clear that EMC faced a burning need for a massive and rapid transformation of its ERP infrastructure on a global scale. EMC’s immediate and long-term success and growth depended on a new ERP infrastructure that could be rolled out swiftly, seamlessly and simultaneously across the company’s vast global operations.

After extensive research, evaluation and due diligence, EMC decided to embark on an ERP journey radically different from its own past and comparable industry-wide ERP projects. Instead of customizing the ERP to meet EMC’s unique business requirements, EMC would use out-of-the-box SAP tools and functionality—with zero core modifications—and adapt business processes to a “vanilla” SAP solution.

At the same time, EMC IT would need to build a brand-new, fully virtualized infrastructure and application development and integration hosting platform that would meet the SAP ERP’s requirements for the highest levels of performance, availability and agility.

It was a bold and challenging strategy that would require unprecedented partnership between IT and business units. The commitment of EMC’s senior executive leadership combined with some of the organization’s top business and IT talent were directed toward this initiative.

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AN ERP ROLLOUT ON A MASSIVE SCALE With an aggressive timeline, EMC launched the single largest business and IT project in its history—PROPEL. The initiative involved a global team of 500 people that included 150 EMC employees from finance, manufacturing, sales, services, engineering and IT, as well as 350 consultants, systems integrators and other partner personnel. PROPEL team members worked primarily from EMC facilities in the U.S., Ireland and India.

The PROPEL team members deployed 20 SAP modules, integrated 65 legacy applications, and developed 620 unique objects including reports, interfaces, conversions, enhancements and forms. A parallel effort was EMC’s build-out of one of the world’s largest fully virtualized SAP hosting environment, showcasing EMC’s latest cloud technologies and innovative Application Integration Cloud. The project required rigorous testing, which was executed in multiple phases leading up to go live.

While most companies roll out ERP solutions to one business unit at a time, EMC took a bold approach by launching SAP in “big bang” fashion—all at once across its global operations. The entire implementation from the earliest discussions between the business units and IT to the global go-live was completed in only 27 months. For a company of EMC’s size and scale, the timeline and scope of this ERP rollout was exceptional.

UNPRECEDENTED BUSINESS AND IT COLLABORATION A core priority for SAP PROPEL was to leverage SAP’s built-in capabilities, avoiding customization whenever possible to improve efficiency, enable growth and strengthen data governance. That meant the business would have to adapt to the software rather than the other way around – signifying a major cultural shift for EMC.

Kate Parsons, EMC’s Senior Director, Project Management Office, PROPEL, explains, “PROPEL was less about system implementation and more about business transformation. We had to make a substantial number of business process changes, so business engagement was one of the key tenets of the project.”

The project followed five key phases—Analyze, Design, Build, Test and Deploy. A strict set of guiding design principles were embraced throughout the entire project:

• Design for future state of the business

• Minimize customizations and stay on SAP’s upgrade path

• Move rapidly to mitigate growing system risk

• Use a approach of overlapping phases to accelerate the timeline

• Drive cultural change and transformation

• Develop new skills and competencies for the team.

MAINTAINING THE CORE AT EVERY STAGE To achieve an ERP implementation that would adapt easily to change, the PROPEL team members were committed to maintaining SAP’s core functionality and upgrade path. Close collaboration between the business and IT, as well as unwavering commitment from EMC’s executive leadership, were essential to fulfilling this overriding objective.

During the Analyze phase, the PROPEL team focused on understanding what impact SAP capabilities would have on business requirements and how business processes would need to change to adapt to the SAP software. If gaps in fulfilling business requirements remained after this phase, the team determined if certain legacy applications should be retained or if the SAP software would be enhanced without core modifications.

The Design phase involved documenting each critical business process and its requirements. The processes were organized by five key functions—Order-to-Cash, Product Delivery, Procure-to-Pay, Record-to-Report, and Information Management. The outcome was a blueprint for aligning key processes with SAP and building the new infrastructure (Figure 2).

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Figure 2: PROPEL Process Scope

The global build-out of the SAP application environment, IT infrastructure and the Application Integration Cloud, an innovative application development and integration environment created by EMC IT, were the primary focus of the build phase. The team evaluated 185 legacy applications, from which 60 were retired, 60 remained as part of the legacy system, and 65 required modification by partners and vendors (Figure 3).

Figure 3: SAP Module Landscape

To accelerate the development process, EMC embraced a “follow-the-sun” model. The PROPEL developers, many of whom were based offshore, collaborated closely across geographies, which enabled both design and build phases to proceed with maximum efficiency and speed.

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A COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEM OF GOVERNANCE Recognizing that PROPEL represented massive change for the way EMC conducted business, EMC developed a comprehensive process for governance and hierarchical decision-making to ensure the project stayed on track and met its key objectives.

For example, the Project Management Office (PMO) created to govern PROPEL, oversaw a Change Control Board (CCB) comprised of business and IT leads (Figure 4). CCB members met frequently to review and analyze any customization request regarding SAP process, flow, technology or tool.

When requests were approved, the development team then leveraged “user exits” within SAP to enable customization without diverting from the SAP upgrade path. When enhancements were not approved, the GPOs led the necessary process changes at the business level.

Throughout the project, team members participated in a rigorous schedule of meetings to review metrics, objectives and timelines as well as raise and resolve issues.

Because of PROPEL’s success in managing change, the CCB and other new governance processes will stay in place to facilitate future SAP PROPEL enhancements.

Figure 4: SAP Enhancement Review Process

PREPARING FOR THE BIG BANG To get ready for SAP’s launch, the PROPEL team conducted extensive functional, integration and verification tests over nine months. In addition, the team ran five simulations in 18 worldwide locations to practice the cutover to the production environment and resolve any issues.

“A lot of key learnings came back each time we ran a simulation,” Parsons explains. “So when launch day came, we knew exactly what to do and not to do, which allowed us to execute flawlessly.”

The simulations covered all aspects of the launch, including converting master data and transactional data, configuring SAP, loading users, pointing interfaces from legacy applications to SAP, and processing sample transactions to ensure they passed through the interfaces properly.

**All enhancements will be upgradable

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The testing phase also included two months of business simulations. Hundreds of business users participated in the simulations to learn the technical details and master the timing and sequencing of the cutover.

Parsons says, “The business simulations were one of the most impactful things we did to make the solution real for the business before we went live. We told the business users that this was their opportunity to simulate real-world processes as if the system were live and we’d be there to support them. It got the business users engaged and prepared them for the true go-live.”

Another key part of the global rollout also was training 8,000 SAP users. To meet the challenge, the PROPEL team developed 140 training courses delivered to 300 locations worldwide. Training included instructor-led classroom courses, virtual sessions conducted via teleconference, and self-guided web-based training.

Big-Bang Cutover PROPEL’s launch plan called for rolling out SAP worldwide in just four days. To minimize impact on EMC’s business, the team timed the rollout to occur just after the quarter closed over a long U.S. holiday weekend.

SAP was first released on a Thursday to 400 super users who were closely involved in the development and testing to validate the cutover. Once these users put SAP through its paces, the PROPEL team released the environment to an additional 1,200 super users for the final validation which was completed Sunday evening. By Monday morning in time for users in Asia to begin their workday, all 8,000 SAP users worldwide were up and running.

Helping new SAP users work through the first business quarter was critical. The super users, stationed in 18 locations worldwide, served as a first-level support resource to answer “how to” questions. Eight global support centers, staffed with ten to 25 trained SAP experts, provided additional assistance. PROPEL “command centers” in three primary IT locations—Massachusetts, USA; Ireland; and India—provided a third tier of support for IT issues.

“We wanted folks to get a high-touch, ‘white glove’ kind of service,” recalls Parsons. “We fielded a couple hundred calls the first few days after the launch and quickly got people over the initial hurdles.”

A NEW PRIVATE CLOUD FOR SAP Given PROPEL’s massive scope, EMC required a brand-new IT infrastructure that would support a single global instance of SAP while enabling scalability to support EMC’s rapid growth. One of the first things IT did was to combine two large groups—the server and storage teams—into one “private cloud infrastructure group.”

The team built a private cloud comprised of two Vblock systems, each configured with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers, Cisco networking components, EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage and VMware vSphere virtualization software. This new cloud infrastructure, one of the largest running SAP, showcases the breadth of EMC’s technology capabilities for supporting ERP on a global scale (Figure 5).

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Figure 5: SAP: Fully Virtualized on Vblock

The private cloud runs on 14 Cisco UCS blades, each with 20 physical cores and 256 gigabytes of RAM. IT also built more than 470 virtual hosts supported by 300 terabytes of EMC storage spread across nine SAP landscapes. Approximately 8,000 users worldwide access the 100 percent virtualized SAP infrastructure via ThinApp clients.

The agility of the Vblock architecture supported the need for the project to begin small and ultimately support a full-scale production environment and long-term growth. For example in testing, IT successfully simulated end-to-end order processing at 2.5 times current peak volumes. In several instances, the environment surpassed its performance goals, processing 3,000 orders in under 10 hours—ten times the throughput handled previously. Plus, these results were achieved with system utilization below 40 percent.

To ensure continued operations if a major SAP outage occurred, IT leverages VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to replicate virtual machines from EMC’s production data center to its disaster recovery (DR) site 600 miles away. EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) provides synchronous replication from the production site to a nearby bunker site, and then asynchronous replication from the bunker site to the DR site.

The DR strategy supports a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero data loss and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than four hours. Based on initial testing, IT expects the infrastructure will achieve an RTO of less than two hours.

ACCELERATED PROJECT LIFECYCLE SAP’s private cloud infrastructure combined with EMC’s application development methodologies were key factors in accelerating the lifecycle of the project, maximizing agility and minimizing risk (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Agile SAP Virtual Infrastructure

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The completely virtualized infrastructure streamlined dynamic creation of virtual machines to support parallel sandbox, testing and development environments. So IT was able to engage in builds and solution validations as the infrastructure was being designed.

Business users also were able to test application functionality and interact with the various SAP landscapes throughout the development and quality assurance stages instead of waiting until production. This created a feedback loop to ensure that SAP would deliver the desired results after the cutover.

However, this approach also created some challenges. IT originally built six SAP landscapes. In some cases, user testing in one phase required more time than expected, while the next phase of testing had to start as planned to stay on schedule. This resulted in a last-minute need for three additional SAP landscapes. Thanks to the Vblock’s agility, IT was able to respond quickly without any impact on PROPEL’s timeline.

William Reid, EMC’s Director, IT Architecture, explains, “With the Vblock infrastructure, we could easily spin up more virtual machines and create additional SAP landscapes to support the business testing cycles. And we were able to manage it with far fewer resources than were needed before.”

INNOVATION: APPLICATION INTEGRATION CLOUD Unlike traditional SAP implementations, the PROPEL project also was differentiated by EMC IT’s development of an innovative Application Integration Cloud (AIC). Using current and emerging cloud development standards, the AIC is an enterprise development and deployment framework for creating next-generation integration projects (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Application Integration Cloud

One of the drivers behind AIC’s creation was that numerous third-party applications and functions in the legacy ERP system would require access to SAP. In the past, point-to-point interfaces between the legacy ERP and external applications resulted in more than 400 unique connections, with each one representing a single point of failure and duplication.

The PROPEL project represented an opportunity to handle application integrations in a completely new and more efficient way. Running across two cloud-based data centers hundreds of miles apart, AIC is a Pivotal-based framework to facilitate data movement. The AIC supports a wide range of communications environments, including real time, asynchronous, synchronous, batch processing, and business to business.

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“We added some intelligence around the data movement so we’re only broadcasting the messages that are relevant rather than moving massive amounts of data at every step,” Reid explains. “With the way we designed the AIC, not every message needs to necessarily go into or leave SAP to reach its destination.

“It’s been a huge win because we were able to knock down 459 point-to-point integrations in the legacy ERP to 125 interfaces in the new SAP environment.”

The AIC also embraces the concept of data marshaling, which means only a message header for a sales order, for example, is sent instead of the entire payload unless it’s requested by the recipient. The result is faster, simpler communications streams.

By using a lightweight, open architecture, the AIC has enabled EMC to lower its cost of ownership. For example, EMC can hire Java-based developers for any application integration instead of maintaining specialized proprietary skill sets for different projects.

While PROPEL was EMC’s first enterprise project to benefit from the AIC, the innovative platform is now a standard for integrations across all enterprise applications, such as SalesForce.com and B2B, among others.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS In the nine months following go-live, initial SAP-driven improvements have been documented across EMC’s business and IT operations. Some of the more notable improvements include:

• With overall system throughput that’s 20 times faster, sales orders move between the configuration, pricing and quoting (CPQ) application and SAP in five minutes compared to 25 minutes in the legacy environment. At quarter-end when every minute counts, the impact on business efficiency has been huge.

• By using EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), the entire financial reporting workload at quarter’s end was moved onto Flash drives to achieve the fastest possible performance. With storage performance improvements of 300 percent, EMC Finance expects to close its quarterly books more rapidly once they have fully adapted to the new processes.

• Thanks to AIC and standard set of SAP business processes, applications can be integrated more quickly and easily into the SAP environment and without having to write hundreds of lines of code. As a result, EMC is more agile when acquiring new businesses or enabling new business services. For example, EMC estimates that acquisitions that formerly required two years to integrate into the legacy ERP can now be integrated into SAP in only two months.

• EMC calculated cost avoidance and savings of approximately $11 million as of the PROPEL launch primarily due to moving from its physical infrastructure to a private cloud built on industry-standard hardware. Over time, the savings are expected to grow exponentially.

• With an agile, highly scalable private cloud for SAP, EMC has taken a major step on its journey to Big Data since it can process massive amounts of information on a global scale. By incorporating Business Analytics as a Service (BAaaS), the new infrastructure opens up many opportunities for enabling new intelligence-based business services.

• EMC’s new Quote-to-Order interface now takes one minute, compared to 20 to 30 minutes in the legacy environment, while Order-to-Cash document processing also is running faster. The result is quicker invoicing and ultimately faster recognition of revenue.

• Because every step in the Order-to-Cash process is linked within SAP, Finance has greater visibility into the status of transactions. That means the collections group can respond more quickly and efficiently to customer questions about invoices and accelerate payments.

• By tracking and reporting on tens of thousands of transactions flowing through the pipeline, SAP helps sales and factory operations make better decisions about product allocation and delivery.

• Manufacturing now has a standardized and scalable platform to more efficiently meet demand when “the hockey stick”—a huge surge in orders—transforms EMC’s global manufacturing floors at the end of every quarter. Previously, EMC’s production order system relied on spreadsheets and manual processes to track process times and material costs, resulting in severe strain of staff and systems to meet order deadlines. The new SAP system sets automatic manufacturing cycle times for each product and enables more accurate cost calculations.

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• SAP addresses the challenge of interacting with suppliers and contract manufacturers, which previously required extensive custom coding that stifled Manufacturing’s ability to make changes. The standardized SAP platform has greatly simplified these relationships and provides EMC Manufacturing with the flexibility to add suppliers and leverage new low-cost regions as they emerge. The result is faster sales enablement and competitive advantage for EMC.

EMC is anticipating greater improvements as the company continues to adapt to SAP processes and the infrastructure is rolled out to additional business units.

BEST PRACTICES FOR THE ENTERPRISE As EMC prepares to extend SAP to other organizations, the company will apply several best practices and lessons learned during the rollout to EMC’s manufacturing and finance units. The SAP Project also is serving as a new model for collaboration between the business units and IT for any major IT initiative in the future.

Here are a few of the key lessons learned during the PROPEL project that have applicability across EMC’s enterprise:

Foster Open Communications Early and frequent communication between IT and the business was critical. By involving business users throughout the process—from design to build to test—the PROPEL team ensured a smoother rollout. Another key aspect was creating a culture that encouraged people to raise issues so they could be addressed prior to going live.

Provide Extensive Practice and Training Simulating the cutover multiple times enabled the team to perfect timing and work out technical issues prior to the launch. Each practice drill revealed insights that helped minimize disruption during the go-live. In addition, cultivating a network of super users provided a valuable support resource that eased users’ transition to SAP.

Understand the Magnitude of Business Change

Because of the focus on using SAP out of the box with minimal customization, greater demands were placed on the business to make process changes. It’s important to not underestimate the impact of these changes and plan for additional time and resources to ease the transition. In retrospect, engaging additional super users and at an earlier stage may have alleviated the impact of such a transformational change on EMC’s Manufacturing and Finance organizations.

Document Your Baseline and Define KPIs

Establishing a clear understanding of your baseline business processes and KPIs is critical to measuring post implementation benefits. It is always very challenging to measure the ROI of ERP projects, however, with proper analysis it is a worthwhile exercise and is very helpful with managing expectations of the business sponsors.

Have the Right People in Place A project the size and scope of PROPEL is intense and not for everyone. Therefore, it’s important to make sure team members embrace change, extreme challenges and time-intensive schedules.

Don’t Underestimate Environment Needs Because of the pace and intensity during the design and build phases, it’s advisable to plan for additional SAP environments to cover unexpected needs.

Plan for Integration Challenges SAP touches nearly every aspect of an enterprise, so know that bridges will need to be built to retain legacy capabilities that are still of value to the business. EMC’s application integration and reuse strategy was paramount to PROPEL’s success.

Focus on Understanding Business Intelligence requirements upfront Special focus needs to be incorporated during business process design to gather reporting requirements in more holistic manner.

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BUSINESS AND IT TRANSFORMATION PROPEL is a shining example of the business and IT transformation that EMC is embracing across its global enterprise to increase efficiency, enable greater business agility and improve competitiveness.

PROPEL has engendered organizational change that will carry forward in the way EMC operates as a business. The governance and stewardship that were established for PROPEL are part of the mainstream IT operation. As new IT requests flow from the business units, PROPEL’s initial design principles, including minimizing customization, designing for the future and staying on the vendor upgrade path, will continue to be followed.

IT also has created three new functions. The Project Management Office (PMO), which was formed for PROPEL, will continue to govern new projects. In addition, a Platform Support group will work with the PMO to handle enterprise release management. And a new SAP Virtual Center of Excellence will house resources responsible for the SAP basis configuration, development and infrastructure. This three-tier model is a continuation of the model embraced by the PROPEL team and is expected to be the standard for how IT and the business work together toward a common goal of maximizing IT value.

As Tony Pagliarulo, SVP, COO EMC Global IT notes “the PROPEL program was the culmination of EMC’s IT as a Service strategy and is a significant proof point that enterprise mission critical applications can be successfully virtualized”.

PROPEL demonstrated the agility and scalability of cloud to handle enormous complexity and growth. As new projects emerge, IT will leverage the EMC cloud to enable rapid and cost-effective change with enterprise-level value rather than simply produce small functional solutions. This has led to new development roles within IT—such as Cloud Application Developer, Cloud Integration Architect and Mobile Application Developer—that will help EMC continue its journey toward cloud computing and Big Data.

The benefits of this IT transformation are substantial:

• Operating system images are now 92 percent virtualized, enabling new OS images to be provisioned in less than one day

• Improvements in IT Cost Transparency, overall IT chargeback has increased from 54 percent to 89 percent

• New IT ‘investment’ projects vs. operational, ‘lights-on’ projects increased from 23 percent to 42 percent

• Share of enterprise-level projects vs. small projects grew from 40 percent to 76 percent

Parsons reflects, “Our new partnership is now an agreement between IT and business to maintain standardization with minimal customization. The business has demonstrated a willingness to adapt their processes and the IT folks are helping them make that happen.”

PROPEL is a model of collaboration that’s unprecedented and will enable EMC to streamline its operations and enable growth for many years. The improved collaboration between IT and the business is one of the most important and transformative outcomes of the SAP project.”

Looking ahead, the PROPEL team is preparing to upgrade SAP in less than a year since go-live--an event that that illustrates how PROPEL’s commitment to standardization is benefitting EMC. Signifying the first time EMC will execute an ERP upgrade in its history, the PROPEL upgrade opens a new chapter of EMC’s accelerated adoption of the latest technologies and business processes.

REFERENCES For more information, please visit:

www.EMC.com/EMCITProven

EMC IT’s IT Transformation blog at http://itblog.emc.com/

 

 

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© Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 4/13 White Paper H11789