Cloud case studies
A global cloud integration on an aggressive schedule
A combined team meshes across time zones to build a foundation for productivity and flexibility
Discover how a global chemical company worked with Deloitte to deploy a cloud-based enterprise integration platform and modernize its technology—all on an aggressive schedule.
A global chemical company planned a multiyear integration program to implement SAP 4/HANA in the cloud, with the aim of folding not only IT but also plant operational technologies into the outcome. The company had to align operations across six continents and needed to be operational on an abbreviated two-year timetable—a tight deadline with its current resources.
As part of this program, the company had to modernize its integration platform required to process a high-volume of messages, spanning across multiple business domains, to be interchanged between diverse systems—on-premises and on the cloud—and trading partners.
The company worked with Deloitte to conduct an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendor assessment and eventually decided to move forward with Microsoft Azure Integration Services. Together, with Deloitte, the company beat its own demanding deadline and stood up the new cloud platform to provide integration capabilities, clear processes, documentation, an IT/OT integration framework, and skills for future growth.
“Having a team with in-depth experience architecting and implementing an enterprise integration platform on Azure and that was willing not only to build but also to teach added tremendous value for us. We not only set up our cloud environment but also received first-class knowledge and documentation.”
—Senior IT leader, Deloitte client
What happened next
Company leaders wanted to save valuable time by putting the project in motion without the need for initial experimentation or proofs of concept. That made it especially important to choose an implementation partner with the experience and tools to begin right away and make rapid progress. Deloitte has a successful history with similar cloud implementations based on a defined set of accelerators and automation pipelines. That, combined with the organization’s breadth of experience following the Cloud Adoption Framework, made it possible to meet a high standard in a short time.
The company also wanted to learn the skills and acquire the knowledge to implement future phases on its own. As one senior IT leader within the company said, “Having a team with in-depth experience architecting and implementing an enterprise integration platform on Azure that was willing not only to build but also to teach added tremendous value for us. We not only set up our cloud environment but also received first-class knowledge and documentation.” Deloitte created handover videos and direct cross-references to cloud resources and documentation that met the organization’s operational readiness needs.
One of the key features of the integration platform was resilience against regional disasters on the cloud. Deloitte implemented a highly available multi-region platform with automated failover and failback pipelines. To build confidence for future needs, support team members shadowed the delivery team during early failover and failback cycles, then switched places later in the process.
To provide the flexibility the program needed, Deloitte implemented a Center for Enablement and structured the delivery so different teams could lead development in their own areas, united by governance, reference implementations, common processes, frameworks, standards, and quality controls.
Time wasn’t the team’s only challenge—time zones were a factor as well, spanning six continents. Having a truly global team was key to keeping the project coordinated and on schedule.
Given that in-house teams didn’t have experience with agile approaches, the work plan included an agile delivery methodology and communications to bring all participants up to speed. Using specialized methods and accelerators, teams were soon coordinating their efforts. Deloitte also leveraged Confluence, a third-party collaboration wiki, to share knowledge across multiple teams, including design templates, development patterns and practices, operational guidelines, and procedures.
Through these measures, the team was able to move ahead of schedule and set up an enterprise integration landing zone using an automated DevOps pipeline months ahead of schedule.
With the first phase complete, Deloitte will continue to work with the company in the years to come to modernize hundreds of workloads from the on-premises environment to the cloud.
By the numbers
In the initial release...
1 global enterprise integration platform deployed across multiple regions for business continuity
45+ integration services deployed
6 disparate systems integrated across the client’s cloud platform, third-party clouds, and on-premises
5 trading partners integrated
$20M+ sales processed per month by the integration platform
1,000+ messages processed per day by the integration platform
30+ documented developer guides
20+ documented operational guides
8 integration artifact specification templates
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