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.