Managed, Hosted Service for SAP ECC

SAP was implemented within Isle of Wight Council (IWC) in 2009 for Finance and in 2010 for HR & Payroll. It currently sits on 13 internally hosted servers and is largely maintained and developed by the IWC ICT team. It is a key system for IWC that is used either directly or in-directly by almost every member of IWC staff at some point. The servers that the system run on are now 8 years old and running out-dated versions of Windows operating system and MS SQL. As a result the versions of SAP that we can currently upgrade to is restricted, which severely limits development opportunities. It also now means that we will not be able to install the system pre-requisites for the annual Country Legal Changes (CLC’s) at the beginning of 2019.

Alternative approaches to ERP have been investigated however in late 2017 it was agreed that SAP would continue to be used as the IWC ERP system. With the timing and potential costs of refreshing internal hardware it was agreed we should move to a hosted hardware environment on the current version of the SAP Software. On that basis we need to plan for a move of our existing SAP infrastructure in to the cloud – what has been described in simplistic terms as a ‘Lift and Shift’. Due to the need to upgrade existing ERP stack levels as a pre-requisite to the 2019 CLC’s post migration, we need to be live in the cloud by 30 September 2018. Finance functions fulfilled along with payroll functions will remain on ECC 6. It is proposed that HR & Self-service will also remain on the ECC platform utilising the existing ESS/MSS portal although alternative SAP platforms can be considered as part of the proposals.

Requirements:

The requirements here can be broken down in to 3 key areas:-
• Migration of our entire current SAP infrastructure to a hosted environment excluding Solution Manager but including ERP, SRM, ESS/MSS Portal and HMRC gateway but on to supported Operating system and SQL database levels. An upgrade to the SAP Kernel version will also be required as part of this move.

• Hosting of our entire SAP infrastructure in the cloud excluding Solution Manager but including ERP, SRM, ESS/MSS Portal and HMRC gateway on to supported Operating system and SQL database levels. This will be on an IaaS and PaaS basis with the OS and SQL level plus Kernel being managed by the provider from day one.

• DBA/Basis remote management and monitoring services. A transition period will run from 1 October 2018 and 31 March 2019 with a fully managed service from 1 April 2019. Support will be required immediately post migration to facilitate ERP stack upgrades and potentially implementation of EHP7 (or 8). Must include Daily system monitoring, Incident and Problem management, regular SAP Kernel and database patching and HR Support pack application.