How METRO AG is migrating its SAP finance systems to Google Cloud

As we kick off Next ‘18 in London, we’re looking forward to spending two full days hearing all the ways Google Cloud customers across Europe are taking advantage of the cloud to innovate and transform their businesses.

One customer voice we’re particularly excited to hear more from is METRO AG. With more than 150,000 employees in 35 countries, METRO is one of the largest B2B wholesalers globally. METRO’s goal is to take the food and hospitality sector to a new level by bringing digital technology to every part of the business. We’ve been working with them on a number of fronts to help them get there: infrastructure, networking, security, analytics and collaboration technologies.

In 2017, METRO began migrating their entire e-commerce platform to GCP in order to improve performance, scalability and compliance. This has helped them leverage tools like BigQuery to generate data-driven insights for more personalized customer experiences. They’re also using AI and machine learning to better serve their customers. For example, many of their customers are restaurant owners. By taking advantage of machine learning, they can create tools that identify when a restaurant is out of a particular ingredient and automatically order more. METRO has even launched their own innovation lab to explore even more solutions that improve the customer experience—both in store and online.

Today, METRO is hard at work consolidating 100 different SAP instances into one SAP S/4HANA system—innovating on SAP Cloud Platform with the help of GCP.  In the past, METRO relied on unique finance systems that were different in each country. Updates or system testing required substantial coordination across numerous teams, which was both time-consuming and costly. Shifting away from on premises and deploying one centralized cloud-based system allows them to support everything from classical role-based accounting to the use of cognitive tools, all on one platform. This presents them not only with technical advantages but the opportunity to evolve how their teams work together.

“With the decision to migrate SAP Finance Systems to Google Cloud, we are significantly accelerating the service for our customers,” says says Timo Salzsieder, CIO of METRO AG. “That is because Google Cloud, in addition to technical advantages, also offers the possibility to optimize collaboration within the individual teams. Moreover, we can now adapt our system to customer demands in real-time.”

We’re excited by how METRO AG is transforming their business through the cloud, and we look forward to hearing more about their efforts in the years to come. To learn more, watch their video or find out more about SAP and Google Cloud solutions on our website.