PKN Orlen: success of one of the largest SAP upgrades in Central-Eastern Europe
15-11-2005
PKN Orlen and BCC have reported the success of a jointly executed upgrade of SAP R/3 system. In terms of the project scale it was one of the largest upgrades not only in Poland, but also in Central and Eastern Europe.
SAP installation in PKN Orlen, the biggest producer and distributor of fuels in Poland, is one of the biggest in our part of Europe. 1,300 people use SAP and the data base has almost 2 TB. The project consisted in transferring the previously used 4.6B version of SAP R/3 system for Enterprise 4.72 version.
The complexity of the project resulted from a wide range of SAP functionalities covered by the upgrade and the number of interfaces for data interchange, but also the necessity to coordinate the work of a few dozen people in 9 project teams and train more than 120 users in new system functions. The priority was the safety of migration to the new version.
Mateusz Stefański, IT Office director in PKN Orlen, says: ”When planning and executing the project we had to take into consideration many factors. The most important of which were: minimizing the number and time of system switch offs and the resulting disturbances in the operations of the whole company, limiting the system’s inaccessibility to two days at the most, and the necessity to conduct development works during the project, including implementation of significant changes resulting from PKN Orlen restructuring”.
The works connected with the upgrade started in May and covered the following scope of SAP solutions: financial accounting, fixed assets, controlling and project system, materials management, plant maintenance, sales and distribution. The upgrade also covered the interfaces that connect SAP R/3 with other SAP and non-SAP systems used in PKN Orlen.
Implementing changes of SAP R/3 system version was a joint project of a team of PKN Orlen employees who maintain and develop SAP R/3 system and BCC as a partner-advisor in SAP solutions. As a result of the upgrade of 18 September the users obtained fully operating SAP R/3 functionality in a new version. The upgrade did not cause any disturbances in the system operations, which on this scale of changes should be deemed a real success.
”We realized the objectives and effects as planned and scheduled. The project success, with its wide scope (7 modules, 17 business units, integration with a data warehouse and mySAP HR, a number of interfaces with satellite systems and gas stations, a large body of own software) and a short time of the project (4 months) was possible only thanks to systematic and efficient cooperation in the whole team”, sums up Mateusz Stefański.
