Who is Kubota?
For over 40 years, Kubota Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) has been the leading supplier of agriculture, construction, and power equipment. All of Kubota’s equipment is distributed and serviced through its authorised dealership network of 186 businesses across ANZ.
Why SAP Support?
Following the migration of its critical SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure (Azure), Kubota ANZ (Kubota) entered a tailored Evenflow Enterprise Support Services agreement with Zag part of Accenture (Zag) for SAP Basis and some application support, to help keep their IT team focused on value-add projects. “You can’t grow when you are fighting fires every day,” states Jonathon Bonnici, IT Service Delivery Manager, and with an ambitious 100% growth 5-year target, Kubota needed to make a change.
What Enterprise Support model?
Kubota ANZ opted for Zag’s Evenflow support model which spreads the cost of delivering fluctuating support -requirements evenly over the year, an increasingly popular alternative to fixed-price billing.
In an Evenflow model, the monthly invoice contains one consistent charge as agreed upon, accompanied by an activity report that outlines what work has been completed, how much of the budget had been utilised and a closing balance. The balance between billed and utilised is carried forward each month, allowing high use months to be balanced out and a bank of time to be built up.
The Controlled Environment supported, comprises of database software and SAP applications (SAP ERP, Solution Manager, Web Dispatcher, and Router), including the Development, Quality Assurance and Production environments of Kubota.
Table A. Service categories and provided services
| Base Services (all activities and services required to manage the Controlled Environment that do not specifically relate to SAP Basis) | Service Delivery Management Service Operations Escalation Process ITSM and Knowledge Base Service Reporting 24/7 Priority 1 Basis |
| SAP Basis – Proactive Services (all the proactive Services required to run the SAP application platform for the Controlled Environment) | Architecture & Capacity Planning SAP Solution Manager Tuning System Reports Incident Processing Weekly/Daily Checks |
| SAP Basis – Preventative Maintenance (all the preventative Services required to run the SAP application platform for the Controlled Environment) | SAP DB Patching SAP Kernels/Java/Web Dispatcher Security Notes |
| Pre-bought Basis Support Set hours per/month |
SAP Basis reactive support (break/ fix and Service Requests) Services |
| Time and Materials Reactive Support over set hours per/month | SAP Basis reactive support (break/fix and Service Request) Services |
| Afterhours Call Outs (T&M) | Fixed amount per/hour |
Graph A. Responsibility model
What are the benefits?
“Everyone in the IT team will testify that we’re benefitting from the support structures in place. It’s allowing that growth without us needing to double our IT footprint,” says Daniel Lodder, Head of Enterprise IT. “It’s fantastic to go home on Friday and know that your vendors have your back, to know that you can take annual leave and not have to check your phone because they’ve got you covered, you don’t need to worry.”
“That trust and that relationship with key partners is what’s going to take us forward,” concludes Bonnici.