BOLUDA harbors safely into Oracle Cloud

BOLUDA offers an expertise in harbor and marine services to clients worldwide ensuring the essential link between land and ocean. As a long-standing player with a strong tradition in maritime culture of quick and efficient solutions for coastal and marine towage, ship assistance, and emergency operations, BOLUDA FRANCE was looking for enhancing its Financial Applications. BOLUDA FRANCE Teams have then decided to move their on-premise SAP and Oracle E-business Suite into Oracle Cloud (OCI).

An efficient program fueled by Sopra Steria Transformation Services 

BOLUDA is one of the world’s leaders in maritime services. The company has a worldwide presence and operates a fleet of more than 300 tugboats in 75 ports in 19 countries across Europe, the west coast of Africa, America and the Indian Ocean. With over 650 years of combined heritage and flexible approach, adapting to new reality of business is essential for success. 

Based on a first joint experience, the three companies have established a multidisciplinary Task Force, and defined a 4-month transformation program. If this last may appear as a technical migration, the Task Force has especially cared to involve users at every stage of the program to keep the program aligned with the initial expectations relative to business processes enhancement and agility. The transformation has then been led into two major projects: the transition from SAP on-premise to Oracle Cloud IaaS and PaaS and its integration with existing business process supported by Oracle E-Business Suite and a “lift and shift and extend” transition of this last from on-premise to Oracle IaaS and PaaS. Supporting 24/7 operations across the world, all the transformation activities has been planned to narrow impacts on user daily business.

Performance, scalability and business agility, the Cloud benefits exceeding expectations 

After a successful 4-month transformation plan in H1-2020, the new platform provides henceforth an enhanced release of integrated business processes to all users wherever they are located in the world. It includes advanced analytics to facilitate decision-making. The user teams can also easier test, experiment and deploy new features. The performance issues met on-premise are now resolved, and the solution capabilities scale up and down with business activities. It allows reducing both the TCO and the carbon emissions, satisfying BOLUDA’s financial and ESG commitments. Finally yet importantly, Cloud security is now native and similar to every countries. The new platform is up and ready to harbor new processes supporting sustainable towing services.

“BOLUDA has a long-standing tradition of efficiency, safely and innovation. The financial application system is the nervous system of all our operations across the world, on a 24/7 basis. Therefore, it was essential for BOLUDA to leverage from all Cloud benefits to offer the best user experience to our Teams”. Lionel Hoarau, CFO at BOLUDA France.

Benefits

For the IS Department	For Business Teams
Business process enhancement and move to Cloud risk control Better performance and scale up capacity aligned with business Cost reduction by 45%, including high-availability services Improvement of Cyber Cloud Security	Including advanced analytics, business agility to experiment, deploy new features easily A global delivery model supporting the worldwide activities Environmental benefits due to reduced emissions aligned with BOLUDA’s “zero harm” environmental commitments

Key Figures

• 300 tugboats in 75 ports in 19 countries in Europe, west coast of Africa, America and Indian Ocean,
• 2 main SAP Financial and Oracle e-Business Suite moved,
• 6 main critical business features: Accounting, Purchasing, Inventory Management, Towage (customized), Financial and Financial Consolidation,
• Seamless business process and Cloud transformation performed in 4 months.