EACOM Timber Corporation

Impressive Results

• Establishment of a recovery process in case of disaster
• Compliance with the latest regulations
• Data security

About EACOM Timber Corporation

EACOM is a leading wood products company in Eastern Canada, involved in the manufacturing, marketing and distribution of lumber and value-added wood products, as well as in the management of forest resources. With seven sawmills with a production capacity of approximately 900 million square feet of lumber, EACOM has approximately 800 employees. In 2010, EACOM acquired the Domtar Forest Products Division. This was partly dealt with at the beginning of the project.

Challenges and Objectives

The main objective of this project was to update the company's management system to be at the cutting edge of technology. This required us to:

• Migrate the version of the SAP solution that was no longer supported to its updated version;
• Move the physical platform to a hosted solution;
• Change the database for a newer version;
• Update all obsolete hardware that was compromising operations.

Running of Operations

Following the acquisition of Domtar's forest products division, analyzes were conducted to determine whether it was better for the company to migrate the existing SAP solution or to move forward with the implementation of a competing solution. Once established that it was better to maintain the SAP ERP solution, EACOM issued a call for tenders to find a single partner for all their SAP needs.

Createch was selected thanks to the quality of its response, as well as the expertise and professionalism of its team. The one-stop shop that forms the firm made it an obvious choice (hosting, project delivery, maintenance and support). In addition, the presence of Bell, sole shareholder of Createch, was a reassuring element for EACOM.

As such, several items needed to be migrated:

• Update of the SAP solution (SAP ERP 4.6C to SAP ECC 6.0 EhP7);
• Change of the database (MaxDB to Sybase);
• Migration to a hosted virtual environment at Bell Canada;
• Migration of the data warehouse (SAP BW 3.0 to SAP NetWeaver 7.4);
• Implementation and configuration of SAP Solution Manager.

The project required the participation of about ten EACOM employees, both full-time and part-time; as well as three to six Createch resources, according to the stage of the project.

A few days passed between shutting down the system and going live. This downtime was necessary in order to migrate data from the old version to the new one, as well as the transfer of applications and hosting. 

Future Projects?

Mobility is in the future in continuing the efforts of 2015, EACOM is considering the addition of barcode systems for order taking, as well as an access to a web and mobile version of its SAP solution. In this way, inventory management and the work of mobile employees would be facilitated.