Lemongrass shepherds Sarawak Energy’s transition from SAP to AWS

The Melbourne-based office of global software-enabled services provider Lemongrass has successfully shepherded the migration of Malaysian-based client Sarawak Energy’s SAP systems to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Lemongrass’s SAP-on-AWS professional and managed services experts are leading a multi-year strategic agreement to transition Sarawak Energy’s existing SAP S/4HANA to AWS, followed by a larger and project to consolidate its SAP ERP Central Component 6.0 system with the existing S/4HANA system.

Sarawak Energy provides electricity to more than three million people and serves a customer base of more than 700,000 companies in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, in Sout East Asia. It is Malaysia’s largest renewable energy provider and aspires to become a sustainable digital utility by 2025.

An initial transition from SAP HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud) to AWS aimed to provided Sarawak Energy with a more secure, stable, flexible, and cost-effective environment for its SAP assets.

With this foundation in place, Lemongrass’s Melbourne-based APAC office, with assistance from the firm’s delivery offices in Malaysia and the Philippines, began a second stage to consolidate the utility’s infrastructure and applications to an SAP-on-cloud environment.

The ongoing digitisation of Sarawak Energy’s key business systems aims to drive excellence in its operations, advance its sustainable growth agenda, and deliver value to all its stakeholders and customers.

Lemongrass has been migrating SAP users to the cloud since 2010 via its Lemongrass Cloud Platform and Managed Services, with more than 6000 SAP servers and 300,000 users currently under management.

“Our work together will result in a highly secure, stable and flexible SAP environment on AWS with enhanced levels of automation,” says Jason Nicholl, Lemongrass Executive Vice President of Asia-Pacific.

Sim Ko Sin, the Chief Digital Officer of Sarawak Energy, says it’s critical for the utility provider to leverage digital technologies, enabling it to remain competitive in an era of rapid change. “This also requires us to establish purposeful collaboration with partners who have the required expertise and tools,” he says. “We are happy to have Lemongrass onboard to help support our digitalisation journey.”

Wan Bahrain Bin Wan Othman, Sarawak Energy’s Project Director of S/4HANA Migration, says the multi-stage process with Lemongrass has already provided critical learnings.

“For any organisation in the planning phases for their own SAP to Cloud migration, involving stakeholders from the word go is of critical importance. Even those not directly involved in the migration process will be impacted in the long run, so it helps to be communicative from the start,” he says.

“Beyond that, it quickly became clear that change management is a must for all business-wide projects. Preparing your team and spending sufficient time aligning corporate strategy direction with everyone involved – directly and indirectly – is invaluable.”