Vodafone had already been working closely with Google Cloud for some time. With its Nucleus data platform, built on Google Cloud, it has been extracting significant value for improving the customer experience from its anonymised and aggregated data. The company uses BigQuery to consolidate internal, external, and third party data sources, driving enhanced data insights, reducing costs, and enabling it to onboard new business domains – all while adhering to its strict security requirements. With its relationship with Google Cloud already well established, Vodafone saw its migration of its SAP ERP to Google Cloud as a natural progression.

Over a two-year period, Vodafone and the Google Cloud team worked together with SAP and Google Cloud partner Accenture to migrate Vodafone’s large platform to the cloud. Given the platform’s critical role in enabling Vodafone to provide a reliable service to its customers, it was essential that the migration occurred with minimal interruption.  

“Despite the size of the ecosystem, we managed to complete the migration with zero business disruption,” Stegmann recalls. “I’ve been in IT for 30 years and I’ve run some very, very large programs, but I’ve never worked on a program that ran so smoothly. This really is a program of reference.”

For Antonio Leomanni, EVO2CLOUD program lead at Accenture, “the tight collaboration between Vodafone, Google Cloud, SAP, and Accenture was crucial in addressing the complexities of migrating such a vast landscape. It's been an exciting journey where we learned from each other on a daily basis and set the foundation for further innovations.”

With its ERP running on Google Cloud, Vodafone can now focus on how it extracts more value from its SAP assets, and redirect all the effort that would have gone into managing hardware cycles and batching infrastructure generators into solving real business problems and focusing on strategy.

The migration has already resulted in big improvements in the performance of its ERP, including a 12% improvement in response time, enhancing the user experience. The integration layer, meanwhile, which includes 600 interfaces to legacy systems, has seen a 50% improvement in processing time, while in the business-intelligence space, the ability to spin up SAP systems on demand has driven a significant reduction in development time, increasing the speed of innovation by up to seven times, per Google's internal data, 2023.

Individual business processes are now being performed up to five times faster than they were, with the month-end close accounting process now taking just five days to complete, down from 15 days just a few years ago. Meanwhile, running its ERP in Google Cloud has enabled Vodafone to manage its stock more dynamically in Germany, its largest market, helping it to reduce inefficiencies while improving its customer service.

Vodafone is now building on these improvements by combining its Nucleus data platform with its SAP ERP on Google Cloud to enhance its analytics and process mining to gain new business insights. It has also conducted a generative AI pilot using data from SAP SuccessFactors with Google Gemini Pro 1.5 large language models to update and enrich training catalogs, course descriptions, and tags. With artificial intelligence solutions, Vodafone is continuing to develop and launch new-generation connectivity and digital services. 

“This project is the sweet spot of our Tech 2025 strategy,” says Stegmann. “What’s exciting is that we got it right, giving us the confidence that going forward we can achieve big and complex things, leveraging Google Cloud to solve our business problems and bring our business strategy to life.”