Why Tomago Aluminium reversed course on its cloud journey

Regaining control

When you’re running a smelter that operates 24/7 — with an ERP system that houses data pertaining to around 30 000 lines of stock — and you’re unable to access the information you need, when you need it, the impact can be serious.

So about five years after the migration, Tomago started to reassess their environment. With the cloud market maturing significantly, the company could now look at what it had and compare it to other solutions out there.

At the time, they explored three options: on-prem, continuing with a managed environment, and moving to an ERP as a service model. For Moncrieff, the conversation was really around ownership, transparency, and cost. During this re-evaluation process, they identified a real lack of insight, control, and visibility across their existing systems.

“An ERP solution like ours is massive,” he says, highlighting that this can make it difficult to keep track of everything you are, and not, using. For instance, he says if you’re getting charged $20,000 for electricity, you might want to check your meter and verify that your usage and bill align. “If your electricity meter is locked away and you just get a piece of paper at the end of the month telling you everything’s fine and you owe $20 000, you’re probably going to ask some questions,” he says. Tomago was told everything was secure and running as it should, but they had no way to verify what they were being told was accurate.

“We essentially had a swarm of big black boxes,” he says. “We put dollars in and got services out, but couldn’t say to the board, with confidence, that we were really in control of things like compliance, security, and due diligence.”

Then in 2020, Tomago moved its ERP system back on-prem — a decision that’s paying dividends. “We now know what our position is from a cyber perspective because we know exactly what our growth rates are, and we know that our systems are up-to-date, and what our cost is because it’s the same every month,” he says. “With the cloud, if we wanted to do additional work or give development teams a sandpit to play in, we had to pay for the additional load. I have many more systems and our landscape is much larger today than it was when we migrated back four years ago, but my cost is exactly the same. Considering the growth we’ve experienced in recent years, being in the cloud may have actually restricted our ability to do some of the more innovative things we’ve done to drive efficiency across the business.”