Raab Karcher Energieservice is consolidating its expanded system landscape over the middle term in a target system, and is expecting a return on investment in excess of 30%.

Clear Case for Client/Server-Based Systems

With VM/VSE, AIX and Windows NT, the IT department at Raab Karcher Energieservice (RKES) had to maintain three operating systems. In 1997 the parent company, Veba Group, began a search for a new IT strategy: all applications were to be running on client/server based systems in the medium term.

This directive was true both for the SAP applications and the clearing system developed in-house, which was to be replaced by a new development. The upshot of these requirements: the future strategic system platform should be constructed on the basis of Windows NT and Oracle.

The Right Solution - Rapidly Found

The strategy had been agreed upon, but was it the optimum way to reach the goal of "SAP R/3 on NT and Oracle"? "We still had R/2, with the RV and RM modules on the mainframe and we were running R/3 under AIX and Adabas-D on an SP2 from IBM", remembers Dieter Moritz, Department Manager of Information Technology at RKES. This posed the question as to whether the two R/2 modules were first to be migrated to UNIX or directly to the new Windows NT and Oracle strategic platform.

Following a variety of financial and technical-organisational considerations, RKES decided to migrate the R/3 modules from AIX to NT in the first step of the new strategic direction while simultaneously transferring the data from the Adabas-D database to Oracle.

COMPAREX - A Reliable Partner for the Migration

Following the tendering in May 1998, COMPAREX convincingly demonstrated their fitness for the task at hand with an offer which was clearly aligned with the needs of RKES, and they received the contract in August 1998.

Looking back at the selection process, Moritz recalls: "Naturally we had to ask ourselves if we could trust COMPAREX, as a successful former provider of mainframes, to be as competent in the open-systems environment as we are accustomed to them being in the mainframe environment." "However, COMPAREX was able to show us that their SAP expertise is every bit as good as their Tetragon expertise."

And seeing as even the competition was offering the Tetragon solution in the USA via Hitachi Data Systems, we knew we were on the right track at RKES. "That was the determining factor in awarding the contract to COMPAREX", remarked Moritz.

Entering the Critical Phase

Beginning in August, only three months were allowed for the actual migration of the R/3 systems and database - a relatively short period of time.

The beginning was marked by numerous test runs conducted by the team around Hedwig Klopot, Manager of the Computing Centre Department at RKES. The objective was to test the SAP migration tools and, due to the non-availability of the system, to determine how much time the actual migration would require. In order to accelerate this - as intended by SAP - the SAP migration tools were adapted to suit the requirements of RKES and standard processes were paralleled from the migration procedure. Time saved: three days.

Due to the year-end closing and inventory, 15 November 1998 was the fixed date to complete the migration. And in order not to hinder daily business, the migration was to be carried out over a single weekend.

New Territory for SAP As Well

SAP - whose consultants advised the project throughout - was not able to provide any information from its own experience as to how a database of this size could be successfully migrated in only one weekend. A joint decision was made to implement the migration in two steps.

An initial step was the determination by project team members in one weekend of the requirements and size of the table spaces which would be created in Oracle. A second weekend was then planned for the physical migration.

Successful and Right on Schedule

The migration had to be completed by Sunday, 15 November. The final countdown began Friday afternoon, and in spite of the fact that it was Friday the 13th, everything went smoothly. "On Monday morning the system was ready for testing and control by the technicians at 9 a.m. sharp", recounted Klopot with satisfaction. And with the exception of a few printer problems under Windows NT, the system has been running smoothly and considerably faster than ever before!

The migration project has also been a success for RKES staff in Controlling. The project was approved at short notice by Veba management due to the fact that a high return on investment was expected - in excess of 30%. On the debit side were hardware and project costs for internal and external staff totalling DM 2.2 million spread out over a long depreciation period. The credit side included the disappearance of SP2. In all the costs for the management and administration of three different system environments was lowered considerably by the concentration onto a uniform platform.

A Concept with A Future

With the exception of the mainframe, where the R/2 modules continue to run, RKES is now employing Windows NT across the board. The new strategic operating system and Oracle database are now being run in the computing centre as well in order to make processes more transparent.

This project was also watched with a great deal of interest by the mother company. Looking back, Moritz recalls that: "Many of my colleagues initially reacted to the changeover to new platforms with a great deal of scepticism." "But we have proven that Windows NT and Oracle comprise a very high-performance and cost-effective platform."

IT at Raab Karcher Energieservice

The IT strategy at Raab Karcher Energieservice (RKES) is orientated according to the following principle: Individual software for clearing services and R/3 for administrative tasks all run on one hardware platform, one operating system (Windows NT) and one database (Oracle).