Joe Taylor (NXP)
Credit: Supplied
Office products distributor National Express Products, or NXP, had to overcome some serious technology challenges on a tight timeframe to execute its messy, forced divorce from Winc NZ.
The already complex deal was further complicated by regulatory hurdles and a protracted trademark stoush.
The end result would be that, once separated, NXP would be in competition with its previous parent company.
Key to the project’s strategic success, thefore, was the need for stringent data confidentiality between the two entities during the data migration process.
Now locally owned, NXP had to shift its operations onto new IT systems within a six month period.
CEO Joe Taylor, says many of the company’s existing partners declined to assist in the separation project, saying it could not be done in that timeframe without affecting revenue or customer experience.
SAP experts DXC Oxygen, however, successfully undertook the complex separation, which included data migration and a full SAP landscape implementation on Microsoft Azure.
“DXC Oxygen took the project on and in the end, we went live five days ahead of schedule, with no customer disruption and volumes traded more than 10 per cent up during the first quarter,” Taylor said in a case study.
NXP’s IT environment included the following SAP solutions including ECC6, CRM, BW, BOBJ, Ariba, Enterprise Portal, Solution Manager, Content Server, WebMethods, as well as Stibo STEP, Adobe Document Server, and NXP’s custom built e-commerce website.
DXC Oxygen recommended the use of Qualibrate, a three-in-one cloud solution that transforms and accelerates the way teams test and document software and train end users.
Equally crucial to the project’s success was the use of Datavard’s automation tools to streamline the carving out of data for SAP ECC, CRM and SAP BW.
DXC Oxygen to set up new IT infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, build up the new NXP SAP environment and
migrate all relevant master and transactional data, configuration, custom code and organisational structures, and the transition had to be seamless for both NXP and its customers.
The partner adopted new implementation methods and technologies and a range of accelerator tools to speed up data migration and testing.
Datavard data transformation tools were used to identify the legal structures, telex the relevant data and ensure the smooth data carve out of NXP’s parent’s SAP systems and the surrounding IT landscape.
Data was preselected, harmonised on the fly and reporting integrity was maintained.
Qualibrate was used to to create, test and implement new processes, dramatically reducing the time it took to build, maintain and execute regression testing from weeks to overnight.
DXC Oxygen was able to run the first fully automated regression test cycle with a team of four NXP business users only 15 business days after starting the test work.
558 level three processes were recorded, automated and included in the regression test set, representing 95
percent of NXP’s level three processes.
Taylor said Qualibrate paved the way for NXP to adopt more agile development methodologies.
“We will be able to make changes to meet a particular market need on the fly and introduce new processes into our live production environment quicker and with less disruption,” he said.
NXP now has a robust SAP platform with a fully automated regression test platform, built with an architecture designed to support many times its current transaction volumes.
The separation project and cloud migration, was achieved on time and on budget with zero downtime, no impact on customers and with no loss of historical sales records or stocking data.
“Our business is now ready to pursue digital transformation initiatives,” said Taylor.
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