Saudi Aramco: The World’s Most Valuable Company Upgrades its SAP R/3 System SBR 1 Saudi Aramco: the world’s most valuable company upgrades its SAP R/3 system 1 Founded in 1933, Aramco is Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, headquartered in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Aramco is managing the world’s largest reserve of crude oil; a humongous amount of 260 billion barrels, the world’s 4th largest gas reserves with 279 trillion cubic feet. It is the world leader of oil exploration, production, refining, distribution, shipping and marketing. Aramco is the world’s largest oil company by production and reserves. The company manages over 112 oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia. It is the world’s top exporter of natural gas liquids (NGL) with over 316 million barrels in 2010. Aramco is owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. In 2005, Aramco was estimated to be worth $781 billion in 2005 which makes it the world's most valuable company.
Aramco manages a lot of operational activities that are connected to numerous business processes. Therefore, it would have been very hard for Aramco to go without an integrated system that is able to understand the oil and gas industry as well as Aramco’s complicated operations. Furthermore, other operational activities need to be integrated and monitored e.g., healthcare, fleet of aircraft, telecommunications, real estate, etc. Saudi Aramco depends on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from SAP. To get benefit from the latest releases from SAP, Saudi Aramco decided to upgrade their R/3 system to benefit from the functional enhancements which have the potentials to render competitive advantage. However, a decision was made to start with the upgrade of the hydrocarbon business and then other units and department will follow. The upgrade project faced many challenges, but mainly the need to manage a 24x7 global business in different operational areas and the need to ensure operational excellence. Further, the aim was to upgrade without disrupting day-to-day business activities and to demonstrate the value of upgrade to the other divisions. The SAP ERP upgrade project had to be accompanied with two other services from SAP: SAP Safeguarding for Upgrade and SAP Active Global Support. IT aimed at a minimized downtime in order to comply with the stringent business requirements, and that is why the project relied on SAP Safeguarding for Upgrade portfolio of services, which was provided by the SAP Active Global Support organization. As a result, SAP managed to finish the project, one month ahead of time. “SAP Active Global Support worked closely with us throughout the project, SBR #1 helping us define requirements, draw up plans, and optimize the environment to ensure rapid implementation”, said Adel Aldoulab, SAP Hydrocarbons Management Division Head at Aramco.
The upgrade team at Aramco planned a twelve hour go-live process. It was planned to go-live through the night and early morning during the weekend. To make sure that no disruption occurs, Aramco installed a small-scale version of the R/3 to a limited number of users and partners so that they are able to maintain critical data which will be migrated to SAP ERP upon go-live. The upgrade took 9 hours and remaining 3 were used in system health check. The project resulted in a number of benefits including: reduced maintenance costs, enhanced integration between different business units and functions, enabling Aramco to seize new opportunities as they emerge. It also facilitated flexible application deployment an improved collaboration via the new portal capabilities supported by the SAP NetWeaver® platform. It was reported that Aramco estimated the maintenance costs savings to reach nearly USD 2 million over the next 3-4 years, as a result of the SAP upgrade. Recently, Aramco extended their SAP ERP system by adding Land Management System. Aramco corporate land, including concessions and reservations, is truly enormous reaching more than one tenth of the Kingdom’s land. Aramco’s operations are connected via a wide network of over 5000 KM of utility and pipelines. The company expansion has resulted in land reservations increasing three folds since 1980. As a matter of fact, the oil and gas industry make extensive use of GIS information in support of daily operations and decision making. GIS information is used in production and exploration, site selection, routing, resource allocation, planning and land management. The Land Management System is an integral part of SAP ERP.
The system integrates GIS information with SAP ERP information. The system integrates 17 separate business processes as well as 3 systems into a single screen, which one SAP authorized user could maintain through SAP. The Land Management System is able to remotely monitor the land through a change detection algorithm which utilizes satellite imagery to detect changes in land use. Together with onsite filed inspection, the system helped Aramco to prevent unauthorized access and/or utilization of its land.

Explain two main security breaches that the system in your case study can have discuss how and why they may happen.