Genting Plantations Berhad (“Genting Plantations” or “the Group”), a subsidiary of Genting Berhad, commenced operations in 1980. It has a landbank of about 64,600 hectares in Malaysia and some 183,000 hectares (including the Plasma scheme) in Indonesia held through joint ventures. It owns seven oil mills in Malaysia and four in Indonesia, with a total milling capacity of 550 metric tonnes per hour. In addition, the Group has ventured into the manufacturing of downstream palm-based products.
Genting Plantations has also diversified into property development to unlock the value of its strategically-located landbank and has invested significantly in biotechnology in a major effort to apply genomics to increase crop productivity and sustainability.
Meeting evolving business needs
Consistently achieving productivity standards well above the industry average, Genting Plantations prides itself as one of the best-managed and lowest-cost palm oil producers in the region. To keep up with its continuous expansion and demands for operational efficiency, Genting Plantations transformed its IT infrastructure, not just to have better control over IT costs and value but also to improve scalability and accessibility, as well as to enhance the Group’s capacity to innovate using the latest technology.
Hence, along this line, the “go-to-cloud” project was initiated in mid-2015, with the migration of the Group’s plantation management software for its operations in Indonesia, which was developed by ARTHA IT in Microsoft Dynamics GP, onto Microsoft’s Azure platform.
Subsequent to the successful migration, a similar process then ensued for Genting Plantations’ on-premises SAP system assisted by HCL and IBM, where the entire system was re-platted from AIX and DB2 to Azure (Windows and SQL). Today, the Group’s SAP systems for both of its operations in Malaysia and Indonesia have merged into one, and is hosted on the Microsoft’s Azure platform.
“The SAP implementation project was a complex one. The system used by the Group’s operations in Malaysia was implemented 10 years ago, whilst the other server in Indonesia was implemented just 2-3 years back. With both systems running on 2 different versions of SAP, we had to make substantial technical upgrades, configuration and standardisation of all interfaces from the businesses’ subsystems throughout,” said Liu Kim Seng, Vice President, IT, Genting Plantations.
Reduced IT costs with streamlined performance and agility
For Genting Plantations, partnering with Microsoft in the transformation of its IT infrastructure yielded measurable results, with improvements particularly in the process of data capturing and retrieval.
In terms of IT costs, Genting Plantations has recorded costs reductions after the migration of its SAP platform to Azure. Thus far, users also reported a quicker and better system performance on Azure, with an ‘up-time’ as high as 99.9%.
The cloud-based system has also enabled the Group to scale up or down its IT infrastructure needs according to its actual needs. By being able to easily change the configuration and capacity, Genting Plantations can now quickly launch a proof-of-concept or tests merely by adding new servers as and when necessary. This in turn will translate to further reductions in usage costs.
Simplification on an advanced platform
Furthermore, without the need of having an on-premises architecture to house the IT systems, the Group is then able to divert its resources, skills and talents towards improving other aspects of the business operations. “Other than simplifying our IT operations, Microsoft has also assured us the security of our data, as Azure is in compliance with various security protocols,” Liu continued.
More importantly, by migrating to Azure, the Group is one step closer towards the realisation of smart agriculture. Through the platform, Genting Plantations is now ready to use advanced technology such as IoT (“Internet of Things”), advanced data analytics, and big data and machine learning in its management and operations.
Microsoft noted that Genting Plantations is the first large-scale entity in Malaysia to move an enterprise SAP system from on-premises to Azure. Liu concluded, “We thank the team at Microsoft for their professionalism and efforts in seeing through the completion of the “go-to-cloud” project effectively and within the expected timeframe despite its complexity. We look forward to working closely with them to continually improve our operations for the benefit of all our stakeholders.”