Credit: Kubota
Zag has shifted core and mission-critical applications, including SAP, into Microsoft Azure for heavy equipment manufacturer and supplier Kubota across its Australian and New Zealand operations.
With ambitious growth plans on the cards, Kubota A/NZ took the opportunity to enhance IT governance to ensure any changes or updates to systems align with the organisation’s strategic goals, tipping off the journey with taking its SAP ERP system to Azure.
Kubota, which has 186 dealerships across A/NZ, previously had most of its digital platforms hosted centrally and on-premises by its parent company, Kubota Japan.
Working with Zag, an Accenture subsidiary and SAP specialist, Kubota completed the SAP system migration from Japan and transitioned to a local cloud instance in five months. Zag also supported Kubota’s disaster recovery upgrade and technical re-platforming.
“The migration of its large SAP workload from Japan into Azure in Australia was completed 100 per cent remotely, from the initial kick-off meeting right through to project completion,” Zag CEO and Accenture New Zealand head of technology Nick Mulcahy said.
“It's exciting to see Kubota leap towards becoming a more agile and autonomous enterprise by transitioning to Microsoft’s innovative cloud technology.”
With critical SAP applications hosted in local instances of Azure, data sovereignty is addressed and the A/NZ IT team can now more directly support staff and add value to operations through enhancements and alternations to core SAP systems based on local needs.
Additionally, the transition of SAP to Azure lays the groundwork for a planned upgrade to SAP S/4HANA in the medium-term.
“It's been a very smooth and successful transition. Having come from a couple of organisations where I've worked on Azure migrations, this is by far one of the biggest and most complex,” Kubota A/NZ head of enterprise IT Daniel Lodder said.
Lodder also noted the digital modernisation allows Kubota A/NZ to be nimble when responding to the needs of Kubota dealers, which is critically important to maintain distributor loyalty.
Kubota A/NZ IT service delivery manager Jonathan Bonicci added the supplier has been able to simplify its IT service delivery and is in the process of upskilling its team to have its own Azure certifications so it can spin up virtual machines, complete its own optimisations, extend and manage its platform.
