TB International: Never out of stock, never out of service
About TB International
TB International was established in 2005, in Ober-Ramstadt, Germany. Today, it is one of Germany’s leading fashion wholesalers.
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About partners
ML6
Based in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, Google Partner ML6 accelerates businesses with AI technology and experts.
Devoteam
With a team of more than 7,000, Devoteam leads digital transformation projects for organizations across EMEA and is a Managed Service Partner for Google Cloud.
By migrating to Google Cloud infrastructure, one of Germany’s leading fashion wholesalers supports rapid growth in the highly competitive world of international clothing retail.
Google Cloud results
- Eliminates SAP system outages to keep mission-critical processes online
- Sets up infrastructure for new offices in less than a week, instead of two months
- Increases server capacity eightfold in two years, without an additional maintenance burden
Supports sustained 30% growth without additional DevOps
In little more than a decade, TB International has risen from a startup to becoming one of Germany’s leading clothing wholesalers. With a vertically integrated supply chain that handles everything from manufacturing to logistics, the company has won the trust of more than 15,000 retailers worldwide. Keys to the company’s success are its two essential commitments: 24-hour delivery, and an NOS, “never out of stock,” guarantee in place across its 15 brands. This winning formula has driven growth above 30% for six years straight, and with it, the rapid expansion of every aspect of the business.
From an original offering of 100 fashion articles, TB International has escalated to more than 120,000, up 30,000 in the last year alone. To keep its NOS guarantee, the company needs ever-increasing quantities of warehouse space for its ever-expanding catalog, and digital storage for its media assets, such as photographs and product details. New, big-name clients bring new responsibilities, and the need to nurture those relationships. At speed, the company expanded from a small team to more than 500 employees.
“We investigated ways to prevent SAP outages. One option was to build up a standby system on-prem, but onboarding new servers was already so expensive, just in order to stay ahead of our needs. Cloud was something we had talked about for years. Now it made financial sense.”
—Tim Winkel, Team Lead Web, TB InternationalSeeking to support that expansion, the company’s IT team found scaling the bare-metal server stacks behind the company’s SAP system increasingly time consuming, expensive, and difficult. So when system outages threatened the company’s ability to deliver for customers, TB International looked for stable, scalable infrastructure better suited for dynamic growth.
“We investigated ways to prevent SAP server outages,” says Tim Winkel, Team Lead Web at TB International. “One option was to build up a standby system on-prem, but onboarding new servers was already so expensive, just in order to stay ahead of our needs. Cloud was something we had talked about for years. Now it made financial sense.”
Meeting the expectations of a fast-growing, high-level customer base
In the fast-moving world of online retail, even brief system failures can put business relationships in jeopardy. For TB International, an outage on its SAP threatened to undermine its agreement with one of its most valuable customers, a leading fashion and lifestyle retail platform that maintains a 48-hour delivery policy. Repeated failure to respect the policy leads to removal from the platform—a potentially disastrous development.
“We really struggled with the SAP update on our on-prem servers,” says Frank Kredel, Team Lead, Infrastructure and Systems at TB International. “We only had a brief window from Sunday morning to Sunday evening to run updates or do machine maintenance. So when an update put the SAP offline until Tuesday, we just couldn’t trade, and were blocked from the platform for failing to deliver in time. We lost a lot of money at the time, but if that happened today, with the level of complexity we have now, our entire business would be severely damaged.”
TB International approached three leading cloud providers for scalable infrastructure to support SAP. One refused outright to migrate SAP to virtual machines; another supplied extensive white papers but no active support. “Google Cloud was the only team to really engage,” says Frank. “From my first call with Google Cloud, it took just nine days for them to come to Ober-Ramstadt with an expert team from Ireland. They said it was early to go to the cloud with SAP, that there were not many precedents, but, in the end, we said ‘let's do it.’ So we did.” Google Cloud partner Devoteam supported the migration and provided advice on cloud deployment from day one, available 24/7.
“With Devoteam, we built up a standard dashboard with Google Cloud operation’s suite for the HANA systems and other projects, installing standard alerting over specific metrics. We can oversee the stability and operation of our solution and the dashboard links to the Google Cloud website, too.”
—Alexander van der Steeg, CIO, TB InternationalTB International did a lift-and-shift migration to 10 instances on Compute Engine. Now updating SAP is as simple as shutting down a server, updating hardware with a mouse click, and restarting the machine, without any outage and minimal downtime. That speed and flexibility soon made itself felt across the organization: using Compute Engine instances, the team set up a new Australian office in less than a week; a process that would typically take two months.
Exploring Google Cloud managed services, the team found new efficiencies, too, such as minimizing maintenance for the company’s database server, using Cloud SQL. Rather than provision and update an instance to act as a data store for media, TB International uses buckets on Cloud Storage. In-house tools for employees are being developed with App Engine, which save money by autoscaling down when not in use. Google Cloud operation’s suite makes performance data available in real time, so instabilities can be stopped before they cause problems.
“With Devoteam, we built up a standard dashboard with Google Cloud Operation’s suite for the HANA systems and other projects, installing standard alerting over specific metrics,” says Alexander van der Steeg, CIO at TB International. “We can oversee the stability and operation of our solution, and the dashboard links to the Google Cloud website, too.”
Building insights into the business with machine learning tools
Delving further into the Google Cloud tools, TB International is collaborating with Google Cloud partner ML6 to build machine learning tools, using Dataflow, BigQuery, and Dialogflow. The team has built a custom sales forecasting engine that allows them to optimize and automate its manual replenishment and purchasing processes and will soon seek to deploy a dynamic pricing model.
“If we can make an efficiency of one percentage point of our complete revenue, it’s an impact worth millions of dollars,” says Alexander. “More widely, the insights from machine learning results should be shown to the business departments. We’re on track to set up a complete decision board for teams across the company.”
“We use Google Cloud as a playground. There are always new functions, even as we reduce our DevOps by using services. Combined with the creativity of Tim, Frank, and our SAP leads, we have creativity, good intentions, and a good business: the complete win-win.”
—Alexander van der Steeg, CIO, TB InternationalCreating an ideal infrastructure for global growth
TB International is now running 80 VMs on the cloud, an eightfold increase in capacity that it would have been physically impossible to fit into its in-house racks. Most importantly, there have been no infrastructure-related outages. Alexander is emphatic: “Without Google Cloud, we could not grow. It’s as simple as that.”
Now the team plans to consolidate all of its remaining physical and cloud servers in Google Cloud, saving money by consolidating its resource commitments and budgeting through Devoteam. And over the coming decade, TB International is set to roll out its services to 100 countries, using Google Cloud products to set up reliable, stable, scalable infrastructure at speed.
“We use Google Cloud as a playground,” says Alexander. “There are always new functions, even as we reduce our DevOps by using services. Combined with the creativity of Tim, Frank, and our SAP leads, we have creativity, good intentions, and a good business: the complete win-win.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About TB International
TB International was established in 2005, in Ober-Ramstadt, Germany. Today, it is one of Germany’s leading fashion wholesalers.
About partners
ML6
Based in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, Google Partner ML6 accelerates businesses with AI technology and experts.
Devoteam
With a team of more than 7,000, Devoteam leads digital transformation projects for organizations across EMEA and is a Managed Service Partner for Google Cloud.