NSW Land Registry pushes SAP into the cloud

The operator of NSW’s recently privatised land titles registry has migrated its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the S/4HANA platform.

NSW Land Registry Services (LRS) completed the six-month conversion project with SAP partners Acclimation and SNP Group in December 2018.

It took place as part of the organisation's wider technology transformation program, which has already seen some 130 servers shift to Amazon Web Services.

NSW LRS, which is charged with maintaining the state’s land ownership system, was privatised by the government in July 2017, and is now owned by a consortium made up of First State Super, The Infrastructure Fund, the Royal Bank of Scotland and UTA Registry Investments Trust.

But last year the organisation made the decision to convert its existing on premises SAP ERP 6.0 system to S/4HANA and replatform on AWS.

It said the project was triggered by a need for a “cost-effective, fast and risk-free solution” for customer billing, procurement and payroll and other financial accounting.

NSW LRS chief information officer Lesa Tobias said the switch had been “seamless” and that the organisation was already seeing results.

“For our customers we are now providing better service enabling lodgements to be submitted and processed faster than in the past,” she said.

“We have seen immediate performance improvements across common transactions such as sales orders, invoicing, payments and leave verifications.

“We have also eliminated many customised reports and are now taking advantage of the reports and insights available from S/4HANA.”

According to Acclimation, the conversion to S/4HANA included "all historical data, database change, unicode conversion, NewGl, selected confirgurations, interfaces and customisations".

Tobias said SNP's Bluefield approach, which uses automated process scans to predict S/4HANA risks in advance, was chosen due to the complexity of the migration.

“We were looking for a software solution that could address the challenges of a complex project to migrate, upgrade and enhance features and data in a single go-live project with a new optimized S/4 as well as adherence to the aggressive timeline targets associated with project of this magnitude,” she said.

SNP said the project represented the “first next generation enterprise conversion in Australia that was orchestrated utilising SNP Bluefield”.

NSW LRS also recently moved its on premises infrastructure to AWS using Melbourne-based AWS partner Versent.

During the nine month migration, Versent moved NSW LRS’ all 130 servers comprising of RedHat, Windows and Solaris and storage exceeding 100 terabytes to AWS.

Correction: A previous version of this story said NSW LRS was owned by Hastings Funds Management and First State Super.