SoftBank Corp. cuts monthly processing time in half after smooth transition to SAP on Azure

As performance slowed and support ended, SoftBank had to rethink SAP 

SoftBank is growing so fast that it’s in the news almost every day. To keep pace with rapid and dynamic business growth and massive increases in data volumes, the SoftBank Corporate Information Technology Division handles the development, maintenance, and operation of systems that support everything the company does. To make it easier for systems operators across the organization, SoftBank is building a next-generation digital infrastructure that extends into telecom, robotics, AI, and IoT.

In the past, SoftBank datacenters have used SAP R/3 and SAP ERP ECC 6.0, but by 2017, performance and support issues had begun to impact the environment. “Swelling data volumes were causing longer processing times, and we began to hear complaints about slow processing times when running monthly and annual processing,” says Daisuke Horiguchi of the ERP Service Section of the ERP System Department under the Enterprise System Division at SoftBank. “When we also faced the end of support for the equipment and databases that we used, we decided to revamp SAP.”

The SoftBank team considered two options: replace the hardware of their on-premises solution or start using a public cloud platform. Evaluating the two options against each other took some time.

“We didn’t have a lot of experience using a cloud platform, so we reached out to several vendors to take advantage of their experience,” says Horiguchi. “We wanted a cloud platform with features we felt were most important: holding down initial costs, being able to set up infrastructure specifically for peak business times and keeping the costs of disaster response strategies reasonable.”

The initial cost of procuring the servers and other equipment needed for an on-premises ERP platform would have been considerable. Using the cloud would mean lower installation costs and allow server specs to be increased or decreased simply by changing settings. Disaster response would add to costs as well, since that would require a separate set of servers in a geographically remote location. In the cloud, the expense for a remote backup would be significantly lower.

Three key SoftBank ERP modules—Material Management (MM), Financial Accounting (FI), and Asset Accounting (AA) —were all tied directly to SoftBank logistics systems. To accommodate its own business requirements, the company had to migrate all three modules together—in no more than 48 hours. To meet that ambitious timeline and its other business goals, SoftBank worked with Information Services International-Dentsu (ISID) to migrate its ERP environment to SAP on Microsoft Azure.

“Many vendors told us that deadline would be hard to meet, but ISID, which had the longest experience in large-scale migrations, proposed migrating to Microsoft Azure,” Horiguchi tells us. “When we did the proof of concept on running fixed-asset ledger processing on Azure, we saw dramatic improvements in speed. We decided at that point to migrate to SAP on Azure, which is optimized for SAP.”

When SoftBank also considered the enterprise focus of Azure cloud services, it made the decision to migrate its SAP ERP to Azure Microsoft Azure. “We found Azure management and operation functions for enterprise to be excellent,” says Ryosuke Nihei of the SoftBank System Design Section, part of the ERP System Department under the Enterprise System Division. “The service also allowed us to configure items on a management screen that in other clouds we could not see without involving middleware.”

Migration time reduced to one-third with detailed rehearsals on Azure

The migration project was managed by Tomohiro Masuko of the ERP Service Section, part of the SoftBank ERP System Department under the Enterprise System Division. He describes how the team wrote rules for the migration to SAP on Azure.

“Different departments have different requirements for Azure. Some want more efficiency, others want rigorous security measures, while still others are looking to get new functions,” says Masuko. “We listened to everyone and set a direction for using Azure as our platform, which meant coordinating with stakeholders throughout the organization. That made this project a good precedent for the kind of in-house coordination we would need to migrate systems to Azure.”

The SoftBank team was very impressed by its ability to fine-tune its SAP on Azure environment, which was impossible in its on-premises environment. “If you need to procure hardware, it’s really not easy to experiment. By using Azure, we could quickly get a server ready right after a meeting,” says Masuko. “I felt renewed awareness of the advantage of the cloud in handling resources flexibly, such as only using high-end disks during migration work.”

In addition to shortening data migration time, the SoftBank and ISID team had one more technical issue. “In our previous systems, we would use on-premises storage functions to create a production environment copy every morning, following nightly processing. There could be as much as 4 terabytes of data,” says Koeda. “We discussed everything in detail with Microsoft from the early stages of the project and verified that we could accomplish the same thing on Azure. While there remained an issue of lower performance during large batch processing, we were able to resolve this slowdown by using a new Azure function—proximity placement groups (PPG)—to minimize network delay by placing the application server and database server in physical proximity.”

SoftBank has developed and verified interfaces with a wide variety of specifications since it first started using SAP. This has led to an ongoing situation where the overall picture is hard to grasp, and the work to map out unified specifications has been rather difficult to launch. Given that history, SoftBank wanted to get started inventorying and unifying its interfaces.

“Migrating the interfaces was tough. While we narrowed the focus of migration in order to minimize risk, that meant that some elements were left in the old environment while others migrated to Azure,” says Kazuki Naito, a consultant in the EIT Consulting Group 1 of the IT division at ISID. “It was quite difficult to identify impacted areas, such as folder structure, jobs, and SAP variance. From early on, we met frequently with customers face to face, with the result that operations started without major impairment, which was a relief.”

Better processing performance and a smooth migration

SoftBank migrated its ERP to SAP on Azure in August 2020 in only 38 hours, an ample10 hours ahead of deadline. The team continued to worry, however, for about one week until the next end-of-month/start-of-month.

“There were no problems. It was too quiet. We felt surely something had been missed,” says Horiguchi. “Every day, the team would meet and express doubts about the fact that it seemed nothing was really going wrong.”

Now, four months after the migration, Horiguchi is almost shocked that nothing happened to negatively impact business operations and pleased at the significant time savings the company has generated with SAP on Azure. “Despite the scope of what we were dealing with, we switched over without slowing down processing or impairing business,” he says. “After the switch to SAP on Azure, monthly processing and annual processing, which previously had always taken dozens of hours, were accomplished in half that. It seems likely that even given increases in data volume in the future, we will be able to adhere to our time schedule for settling of accounts.”

Masuko also has the following take on moving the SoftBank ERP platform from on-premises to SAP on Azure. “Some verification-stage processes did take more time in Azure, but by fine-tuning those, we were able to achieve the same level of speed as before,” he notes. “It seems like everything was accomplished without users having to be too aware of the migration. Operationally, we have been freed from maintenance restrictions and no longer have to waste time on unnecessary tasks, which is huge.”

Using the cloud lets SoftBank tailor the system platform to its specific needs

In December 2020, SoftBank began to deploy SAP on Azure into more areas, including migrating the main database and licenses and optimizing performance. “Once specs are optimized, we are considering introducing SAP on Azure reserved instances, which can be used at a fixed or discount price,” says Masuko.

“We had previously never used a public cloud as a system platform, since we had our own datacenters. However, with the scale of our business and our changing management systems—not to mention major social changes such as the spread of COVID-19—we have come to see the downside of on-premises systems,” says Katsuya Kitazawa, Vice President, Head of the Corporate Information Technology Division at SoftBank. “Namely, such systems have a hard time responding nimbly to change. I think this migration was a good opportunity for us to learn about the features of the cloud. If we need to concentrate access exclusively into a specific time-band or to change the management mesh in a short period of time, the cloud should be the first thing that comes to mind. We want to be smart going forward in seeing what should be on Azure and then using it.”

By moving its critical ERP environments to Azure, SoftBank will continue to innovate and tackle challenges to anticipate the needs of changing times. SAP on Azure will help the firm flexibly engage with its future.