Amber Hickman |
Kyndryl is one of the world’s largest IT infrastructure services providers, serving thousands of businesses in over 60 countries around the world. The company designs, builds, manages and modernizes complex IT systems for clients across all industries, including banking, insurance, government and manufacturing, and holds over 3,000 patents.
When Kyndryl separated from IBM in 2021, the company inherited a set of complex legacy systems that didn’t fit its simplified business and evolving technology strategy. An overcrowded environment of 1,800 applications was not fit for purpose and required more than 50 server locations. Data was scattered across the organization, with more than 68 different information warehouses, multiple master data apps and visualization tools, and limited visibility into data with no central governance.
The company needed to move to a new, cost-effective, streamlined environment that could scale with its business requirements. Moreover, they had a 24-month transition period to complete this transformation, but they had to follow certain principles: They needed to focus on people, customers, skills, and culture.
A key element of the Kyndryl platform strategy was to consolidate 375 legacy apps into the SAP tool suite. Rather than migrating existing customized objects, Kyndryl opted for a clean-sheet greenfield implementation based on current SAP S/4HANA technology.
The company minimized customization by implementing its own legacy functionality rather than adopting a standard system. Additionally, the legacy and new systems worked simultaneously and were synchronized, allowing users to continue working in the legacy system while monitoring data in the new system.
Kyndryl also decided to use Microsoft Azure as its hosting platform and assembled a team of Microsoft experts, including SAP specialists, Azure solution architects, and customer success account managers, to provide Kyndryl with their knowledge and experience throughout the process.
“We didn’t want to create a new, highly customized SAP system,” says Gino Ruggiero, SAP delivery partner director at Kyndryl. “We found that using the Azure architecture and working with our technology partner to make some minor tweaks around high availability would provide greater benefits.”
Kyndryl leveraged Microsoft’s SAP Azure reference architecture and worked with a system integrator to make some modifications, resulting in a highly scalable, highly available SAP platform that uses standard Azure services.
During the first nine months of the transformation, the team rolled out the system from development to testing to production, then revisited each stage and made changes as needed throughout the process.
Over the next three months, they focused on business functions, starting with central finance.
The project implementation team did not take a waterfall approach, but instead identified specific organizational line-of-business requirements, such as ledger management and other central financial functions. Data was tested regularly, and once the functionality was deemed reliable, the team began the first wave of implementation.
This process helped Kyndryl identify gaps in the market and opportunities to help other organizations facing similar challenges. As a result, the company is establishing a new SAP Center of Excellence and working with SAP to develop an SAP Business Transformation Center.
“SAP Business Transformation Center dramatically simplifies data migration and transformation while providing an easy-to-use, guided user experience for our customers and partners,” said Michael Bradshaw, chief information officer at Kyndryl. “Combined with Kyndryl’s deep expertise in data migration and app modernization services, we set up cost-effective, reliable and operationally sustainable processes based on our customers’ unique needs to enable and accelerate their transformation to an intelligent enterprise.”
Post-implementation, Kyndryl identified several business benefits that the transformation effort would deliver to both current and future customers.
For example, Kyndryl’s shipping platform aligns with its enterprise platform strategy to provide a consistent client experience, make shipping more efficient and support automation goals across the enterprise, while enterprise operations can leverage a portfolio of strategic platforms that unify ordering, billing and payment processes to streamline business processes.
But the journey isn’t over: Kyndryl is using the experience it has gained from treating its own environment as customer zero to model the learn-and-optimize cycles that its customers want to experience as they navigate their own business transformations.
By simplifying and optimizing its technology assets, Kyndryl is better positioned to serve its customers and achieve its mission and objectives, and the company will continue to build on this strong foundation with continued improvements to the SAP platform.
This article originally appeared in our Summer 2024 issue. Technical RecordSign up for a free subscription to have future issues delivered directly to your inbox.
