BASF IT Services in Germany is taking over the
management of SAP systems of BASF North America to save the group
money.
BASF IT Services will host and manage the systems at its
Ludwigshafen datacentres.
Andrew Pike, head of information services at BASF Group, said,
"We have consistently been pursuing the worldwide consolidation of
our SAP system landscape for several years now. For us, shifting
the American SAP systems to Ludwigshafen is a logical consequence
of this strategy.
"Owing to the achieved effects of scale and related savings in
day-to-day operations, we have been able to cut our IT costs to a
considerable degree."
Last month, SAP applications with a data volume totalling 75
terabytes were migrated to Ludwigshafen. The BASF IT service
provider is putting 37 new high-performance servers into operation
to host these systems.
There are about 20,000 users from the US, Canada, Mexico, South
America and Europe registered within BASF's North American SAP
systems.
In order to keep the business-critical applications running
without interruption during the migration, it was necessary to
migrate not only the SAP systems themselves, but also the
interfaces to about 120 other applications connected with SAP to
Ludwigshafen, and then test them.
The BASF IT Services Customer Service Center, already a contact
point for more than 50,000 PC users European-wide, is taking over
second- and third-level support for the users abroad.
This means that all detailed questions that cannot be resolved
on the first attempt on location are now handled by BASF IT
Services.