Following a period of rapid growth and a landmark new pipeline contract, one of Nigeria’s leading services companies in the oil and gas sector had an urgent need for a world-class enterprise system.

The objective: end-to-end business transformation, with a focus on enabling all staff to operate effectively wherever they are, and improving internal efficiencies and visibility over the total performance of the business.

Oilserv, a leading provider of integrated engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning (EPCIC) services in the oil and gas sector, chose SAP S/4HANA for a step change in productivity and accelerated business performance.

The ICT Manager at Oilserv, Iheanyi Achereke, says: “We wanted to move our IT workload to the cloud, with multi-region fail-overs and a disaster recovery strategy to ensure business continuity at all times. Core to this was our upgrade to SAP’s market-leading S4/HANA enterprise resource planning platform, which gave us full access to SAP’s powerful embedded analytics.”

Oilserv provides a number of complementary solutions across the asset and program lifecycle within the onshore, offshore and subsea market segments of the oil and gas sector. The company was incorporated in 1992 and commenced operations in 1995.

Achereke says the business also needed a commercial project management tool that would help the business manage all customer projects in a single system. “We were facing several challenges with our existing system, including an inability to manage all project activities, consolidate project dates and report revenue. In addition, we needed to better measure and manage risk, and improve our change management activities.”

Oilserv worked with its implementation partners C2G Consulting to migrate the existing SAP system to S/4HANA with hosting on Microsoft Azure.

In addition, SAP Commercial Project Management was implemented to enhance the capabilities of project management teams.

Partner support was invaluable to the success of the project. According to Achereke, 95% of the migration and subsequent implementation was done remotely. “We used the SAP Activate methodology and collaborated closely with C2G Consulting and the SAP team to ensure a seamless deployment. Daily stand-up sessions, regular town hall meetings and a focus on change management contributed to the overall success of the project.”

Since the migration and implementation, Oilserv has enjoyed an improved multi-channel user experience enabled by the Fiori user interface. “Access to the embedded analytics in S/4HANA is empowering our executives with real-time reports and visibility over the total performance of the business,” says Achereke. “Since implementation, we have also enjoyed faster system response times and improved visibility over our business partners, including vendors and customers.”

The enhanced project management capabilities enabled by SAP Commercial Project Management (CPM) has further improved Oilserv’s issue and risk tracking, standardised its project structures, and empowered internal teams with real-time access to project data. “We now use CPM at our weekly project management meetings at an executive level,” adds Achereke.

Pedro Guerreiro, Regional Director for Central Africa at SAP, says Oilserv has taken bold steps toward becoming an intelligent enterprise with its migration to SAP S/4HANA. “In today’s data-driven economy, organisations need full visibility over the total performance of the business in real time to empower decision-makers. With its landmark migration to S/4HANA, Oilserv has transformed its ability to turn data into insight that can drive business performance while establishing a strong foundation for future innovation and growth.”