A long-time SAP cus­tomer, Esri recent­ly com­plet­ed its mul­ti-year imple­men­ta­tion of SAP S/4HANA. A few weeks after fin­ish­ing the project, Rob Seifert, senior man­ag­er of finan­cial sys­tems at Esri, and John Aus­tria, SAP S/4HANA pro­gram man­ag­er at Esri, took time to talk with ASUG. In the first part of this inter­view, Seifert and Aus­tria dis­cussed the begin­ning stages of their SAP S/4HANA journey. 

ASUG: How and when did your SAP S/4HANA jour­ney start? 

John: It start­ed approx­i­mate­ly three years ago for us. SAP and Esri have a very strong rela­tion­ship from a prod­uct per­spec­tive. We’ve been a cus­tomer since 1996. Our GIS prod­uct is inte­grat­ed with SAP S/4HANA and the solu­tion is also a cer­ti­fied geo­data­base. There was a lot of momen­tum on the prod­uct side, which led to momen­tum inter­nal­ly around imple­ment­ing SAP S/4HANA. The pro­gres­sion to SAP S/4HANA was just a log­i­cal one. The move to SAP S/4HANA real­ly gained momen­tum when Jack Dan­ger­mond, our founder, attend­ed an IT all-hands meet­ing and men­tioned SAP S/4HANA mul­ti­ple times and want­ed to know when we would be migrating.

That was the start of our jour­ney. And then once that meet­ing hap­pened, the ball got rolling inter­nal­ly. We con­nect­ed with Rob on the finance side, and then Esri’s CIO and CFO agreed to part­ner on this project as an inter­nal ini­tia­tive. At the time our SAP Account Exec­u­tive Erik Mekel­burg was close­ly aligned with us as well. He brought in the SAP S/4HANA dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion team, who helped us build our busi­ness case and deter­mine which ver­sion of SAP S/4HANA to imple­ment. We put seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion into migrat­ing to the SAP S/4HANA pub­lic cloud and pri­vate cloud solu­tions. We end­ed up lever­ag­ing SAP S/4HANA on-premise license, which we deployed to Microsoft Azure. It was a long three-year jour­ney for us. We spent a lot of time as well select­ing our part­ner. And we end­ed up pick­ing Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers (PwC) after a very exten­sive ven­dor selec­tion request for pro­pos­al (RFP) process. We then rolled into an 18-month imple­men­ta­tion. We recent­ly went live on Jan. 19 with SAP S/4HANA ver­sion 1809 deployed to Microsoft Azure.