SOCAR Türkiye Launches ‘Project Earth’

SOCAR Türkiye signs one of energy sector's largest SAP projects with 'Project Earth' SOCAR Türkiye, one of Turkey's largest direct foreign investors, has advanced its collaboration with SAP, the global leader in enterprise applications and software, to support its data-driven company vision and growth strategy. In partnership with SAP Türkiye, SOCAR Türkiye has signed one of the largest SAP projects not only in Turkey but across the region and energy sector. Through the Project Earth initiative, the company will integrate SAP solutions addressing different processes into the SAP S/4HANA system and manage them from a single center. SOCAR Türkiye, one of Turkey's largest industrial holdings, has strengthened its collaboration with SAP by launching Project Earth to ensure that applications managing the corporate processes of all group companies keep pace with digital transformation and achieve process-based and organizational integration. SOCAR Türkiye has unified STAR Refinery, SOCAR Distribution, and SOCAR Storage systems on a single SAP S/4HANA platform. Through Project Earth with SAP, the company has modernized its on-premise and dispersed systems with integrated SAP S/4HANA and Analytics Cloud solutions. It has also prepared to support digital transformation of finance, centralized procurement, commercial operations, maintenance and repair, business analytics and master data management processes.

Increased employee satisfaction through unified, centralized system

In Project Earth, which encompasses SOCAR Türkiye's procurement and logistics, asset management, trading and finance business units with more than 100 SAP consultants involved, over 8,000 test steps were completed using remote work methods from the initial stages. With a preparation phase lasting 6 weeks, the project was completed in just 16 months. The initiative aims to replace outdated and dispersed applications with a current, unified and centralized system, while also increasing employee satisfaction. SAP S/4HANA, a next-generation ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution with in-memory technology, improves speed and agility in SOCAR Türkiye's processes and enables faster, data-driven decision-making. Hakan Irgıt, Head of Digital Transformation & Information Technologies at SOCAR Türkiye, commented on the project: "As of January 2022, we have deployed Project Earth, our S4/HANA project that has been running for 16 months and is rarely seen anywhere in the world. In this project, which we implemented entirely remotely from the design phase to deployment, we not only renewed our enterprise applications but also made many new tools available to our employees that we had not previously used. With the project's implementation, our employees can manage corporate processes end-to-end such as accounting operations and invoice approvals, report on them, and enable data flow between group companies. We have achieved inter-company integration across the hydrocarbon value chain from raw material procurement to storage, production to customer delivery. We have introduced our customers to a customer portal that provides real-time information sharing from order to delivery stages. We have achieved our objectives including concurrent planning of operations between planning and maintenance teams, a mobile application enabling field operations to be managed in real-time, and establishment of a single master data structure across all group companies with a common master data glossary. In short, through Project Earth, we have achieved significant gains at every point in our operations, including our employees, suppliers and customers." Uğur Candan, General Manager of SAP Türkiye, stated: "SOCAR Türkiye today stands among the companies implementing the SAP Model Company approach most effectively. We are delighted to be their closest business partner in their digital transformation journeys. We have a roadmap to help SOCAR Türkiye reach its 'Data-Driven Company' objective. Our projects continue to implement this roadmap. The most important success criterion for Project Earth is to take the STAR Refinery project, which has become a global success story, to the next level. Project Earth is the first phase of transformation into a data-driven company and focuses on integration outputs. In our roadmap for future phases, we can envision the transformation of other SOCAR Türkiye companies as well. This project, on which all teams worked with dedication and passion, has been an inspiring one for us too. As SAP, we are pleased to transform our customers' visions into reality," he said.