Out of the Red, into the Green

In 2019, a new leadership team took over at Green Cargo, with the objective of returning the eco-friendly transportation company to profitability and building a business supporting Sweden’s environmental sustainability goals. The company has set strategic objectives that, by 2030, it will increase internal digitalization of processes, automate rail operations, and lead integration of eco-friendly systems. Ultimately, the goal is to find new ways to accelerate technology, data, and innovation to maintain its environmentally friendly competitive advantage and build a modern, open, and scalable platform architecture for the business.

Ingo Paas, CIO, was given the task of developing a new IT strategy that would build a foundation for modernizing the business while mitigating major IT risks. The challenge for his team was that, following the financial crash in 2009, Green Cargo had to take extensive cost-cutting measures and outsource the entire IT operation. A decade later, it was clear this action was having a significant impact on IT investment and was no longer sustainable, leaving the organization with two highly complex core legacy systems: its mainframe and SAP environments.

The first strategic decision was to decide whether to migrate away from the SAP ECC6 EHP 7 environment and invest in a multiyear IT program to replace the existing system or to find a new approach that would support the long-term goals of the business by digitalizing internal processes and automating rail operations.

Long-term, the Green Cargo IT team aims for greater integration with its customers’ main business processes, which will increase transparency and demonstrate that rail services are part of these processes. The team expects to provide a fully automated customer relationship with innovative products seamlessly integrated into its customers’ supply chains. Green Cargo has already built an API management platform to link main applications in real-time and support event-driven alerts in its multi-cloud architecture. The IT team will create a library of micro-services to rapidly build new applications and enable the automation of processes such as booking trains to transport goods.

The Rimini Street Solution: Fast Train to Superior Support

In October 2019, Green Cargo decided to mitigate risk and allow the company to adopt a more evolutionary approach to innovation. Working with Rimini Street earlier in 2017, Green Cargo decided to continue the relationship because using would help reduce the level of risk for the company and ease the burden of finding expert talent to manage these systems.

Rimini Street has become one of five trusted strategic IT partners as Green Cargo looks to implement its agile, low-code IT model; the company knew Rimini Street could be depended on to secure, stabilize, and improve its critical SAP ECC6 EHP 7 platform for many years to come, identifying 24 possible activities where it could help improve performance and mitigate significant risks, such as modernizing the user interface for application access on mobile devices.

Results Delivered

Today, Rimini Street has helped Green Cargo reduce a huge backlog of business development and compliance activities that had accumulated during the time when there was little IT investment, and has stabilized the SAP environment, including SAP payroll, FI/CO, HR, supply chain management (SCM), BW, CRM, and PO.

Data duplication across different systems has proven to be challenging because of highly fragmented business processes. Green Cargo initially found SAP integration tools difficult and costly to integrate and streamline data accessibility. Rimini Street activities included the integration of SAP Payroll and the client systems with more modern, low-code applications in the cloud and the annual adjustment of legal requirements for HR and tax regulations.

Rimini Street also addressed a number of critical incidents, such as the need to stabilize the monthly salary run process. The Rimini Street Primary Support Engineer (PSE) was able to streamline payroll, originally very troublesome; now it operates smoothly every month with a 70% reduction in runtime. Rimini Street also offered a team of experts, including its Strategic Support Services consultants, tax and regulation specialists, and dedicated account management to improve the performance of the Green Cargo SAP environment.

“Our ambition is to deliver an IT roadmap that is driven by business needs rather than by IT, avoiding huge investments and the risks of migrating to other platforms,” stated Ingo Paas. “Knowing that we have Rimini Street as a trusted strategic partner ensuring the stability of our main SAP systems means we have the confidence and capacity to focus on the execution and further development of our goals.”