6 businesses transforming with SAP on Google Cloud
Snehanshu Shah
Managing Director, SAP
Thousands of organizations globally rely on SAP for their most mission critical workloads. And for many Google Cloud customers, part of a broader digital transformation journey has included accelerating the migration of these essential SAP workloads to Google Cloud. These customers seek greater agility, elasticity, and uptime on a truly flexible cloud that includes the benefits of cutting edge AI, ML, and analytics capabilities. It’s why we’ve worked hard to bring our customers a wealth of options to fit their needs, including SAP-certified hardware options and Google Cloud for SAP RISE. We’ve also helped them understand the economic advantages of SAP on Google Cloud, including the significant migration assistance and incentives that are part of our Cloud Acceleration Program.
Below, we’ve shared just a few examples of customers that have chosen Google Cloud to run their SAP workloads, and the benefits they’re seeing.
Southwire: More stability, less worry with SAP on Google Cloud
Following a December 2019 ransomware event and the COVID-19 pandemic that began in spring of 2020, Southwire was preparing for an overhaul of their SAP ECC environment to take advantage of the latest functionality available for this critical ERP system. They also aimed to deploy SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA to accelerate vital reporting for all business users, and the company wanted to upgrade to the latest version of SAP Process Orchestration—an essential component that touches key manufacturing interfaces in all Southwire facilities.
Southwire had looked at multiple options for the upgrades, including remaining entirely on-premises and colocation, but ultimately decided to migrate to Google Cloud. “We wanted to be on a platform for SAP that was flexible, scalable, and secure; that we could count on to get up and running quickly,” says Dan Stuart, Senior Vice President of IT Services. “We chose Google Cloud not only for those reasons, but also because we recognize that Google has other assets that we may be able to take advantage of down the line, such as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).” Read more.
Pega: Optimizing business operations with SAP on Google Cloud
For Pegasystems, a leading provider of cloud software for customer engagement and intelligent automation, it’s important to maintain smooth operations at all times. This includes getting the best performance from its SAP applications. But with its core SAP systems in a traditional data center, the IT department found it was spending too much time on day-to-day maintenance and less on strategic projects that generated value for the company.
In 2020, Pega chose to deploy its SAP environment, including SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and SAP HANA data warehousing, to Google Cloud. The move has helped Pega overcome many of the challenges it faced with the previous deployment. It also made Pega’s SAP systems more reliable and offered powerful new data capabilities to support the business in making the right decisions. Read more.
Casa dos Ventos: Advancing its sustainability mission with SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud
Casa dos Ventos has been on a path of steady growth—the company now represents about 30% of all wind farms in operation or under construction in Brazil. But growth on this scale generates more than energy: It produces vast amounts of data that needs to be processed and analyzed consistently to study wind behavior, control turbines, and forecast power production and climate, to name just a few examples. With the company’s continued expansion, it became clear that its on-premises infrastructure no longer had the capacity to process, orchestrate, and analyze such massive amounts of data.
To keep pace with its growing number of projects, the company needed a solution that would centralize its workflows while providing scalability and flexibility. As a result, it decided to adopt SAP as a business-management solution and host its SAP S/4HANA environment on Google Cloud. When the migration was complete, the time needed to predict the amount of energy generated by a specific project went from 15 days to just one day. Thanks to the new cloud infrastructure and scalable services, the company was also able to process 20 years of data in less than two hours during its weekly data processes. Read more.
FFF Enterprises: 7x performance with SAP on Google Cloud
When there’s a patient waiting for a product at the end of each transaction, there’s far more at stake than just the performance of your ERP system. That’s why FFF Enterprises, Inc. (FFF)—a leading supplier of critical and preventive care medications including the essential medications that help to reduce the effects of COVID-19—chose to migrate its core SAP enterprise applications to Google Cloud. “We're 100% dependent on the ERP system,” says Brian Wemple, SAP Technical Manager at FFF. “It runs the business by integrating with our e-commerce systems; our pick, pack and ship; and our business intelligence. It has to be always available and always accurate.” After running SAP on legacy infrastructure for some time and experiencing core switch outages, server outages, multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) edge router outages, and other issues, FFF knew it needed to revisit its technology infrastructure.
“We've experienced an 80% improvement in the speed of our SAP environment at a lower monthly cost than we saw with our previous provider,” Wemple says about the migration to Google Cloud. “Our SAP applications are so much more reliable than they were previously. We've had no outages since we've gone live—that's just a perfect situation for us.” Read more.
Rodan + Fields: Achieving business continuity for retail workloads
Since its founding in 2002, Rodan + Fields, one of the leading skincare brands in the U.S., has been delighting customers worldwide with its innovative product portfolio. Recently, however, after taking stock of its pre-existing IT infrastructure, Rodan + Fields realized it needed a more modern, scalable solution—one that could keep pace with the company’s growth while simplifying management of critical SAP workloads and delivering access to cutting-edge IT services. Ensuring business continuity was a top priority driving the company’s move to Google Cloud. Rodan + Fields needed an infrastructure solution that would protect against unpredictable, potentially catastrophic business disruptions, such as user error, malicious activities, natural disasters.
By shifting its SAP workloads to Google Cloud, Rodan + Fields is enjoying the benefits of modern, scalable infrastructure, while also protecting its business with a robust business continuity strategy. To support a peak in user access, Rodan + Fields was able to scale Hybris infrastructure by 10X in 10 minutes, supporting millions in additional revenue. In addition, as of the date of this blog publication, Rodan + Fields has experienced zero unplanned ERP outages in the year since the company migrated to running production on Google Cloud. Read more.
Rémy Cointreau: Driving customer centricity with SAP on Google Cloud
Imagine the challenge of supply chain planning and meeting changing consumer needs when you have products that can take up to one-hundred years to produce. That’s the case for Rémy Cointreau, a family-owned maker of fine spirits whose roots go back to 1724. With rapidly evolving consumer expectations and heavy competition from premium beverage brands, Rémy Cointreau set out on a strategy to put the customer at the center of their business. To make this a reality, Rémy Cointreau realized all elements of its business would need to be more agile. It needed more flexibility in its SAP systems, which drive Finance, Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and easy access to valuable SAP system data for business decision making and innovative customer approaches.
Working with long-time partner oXya, Rémy Cointreau unified to one SAP system and migrated to S/4HANA on Google Cloud. While the environment is still new, Rémy Cointreau already sees big steps towards greater agility with Google Cloud. For instance, Google Cloud makes it much faster and easier to adjust the technical operating environment. If a team wants to start performing a new resource-heavy analysis, Rémy Cointreau can expand capacity to meet demands within minutes. The team can also roll back capacity so that it is only using the resources it needs. Read more.
