AWS customers shed light on their ERP cloud transformations with RISE with SAP

ERP systems sit at the heart of many digital transformation initiatives due to their wide-reaching impact on mission critical business processes like financial close, material requirement planning, and inventory movements. These core processes represent the foundation upon which many enterprises build their customer, product, supplier, and employee experiences. Enterprises embarking on ERP modernization journeys often look to the AWS cloud to help them automate, extend, and re-imagine these processes so they can adapt and thrive in today’s evolving economic landscape.

2022 was a very eventful year for enterprises undergoing such ERP transformations. Last year, AWS customers continued to evaluate RISE with SAP -now in its third year- as a cloud deployment option that combines AWS cloud services, SAP S/4HANA and other SAP solutions, and managed services in one contract. A recent SAPinsider RISE benchmark report published in October 2022 cited top factors impacting customers’ RISE with SAP (RISE) decisions were innovation capabilities such as SAP BTP, simplified management and operations, and business process transformation. It is for these very reasons that hundreds of customers chose AWS for their RISE workloads, allowing them to simplify their journey to SAP S/4HANA with SAP BTP services built on AWS and imbed intelligence and analytics into business decision making with 300+ fully featured native cloud services including AI, ML, and data lake services.

Below are a few highlights from customers that chose RISE on AWS and how it helped them with their ERP Cloud transformation journeys.

Arc’teryx

Arc’teryx is a leading vertical retail and design company headquartered in Vancouver, Canada and specializing in outdoor apparel and equipment. The company was running a highly customized home-grown ERP system that was hampering business agility. Compliance with GDPR and individual country regulations were consuming valuable resources and limiting IT’s ability to quickly adapt and respond to business strategy, and global operations. Arc’teryx decided to deprecate their home-grown ERP system and deploy a greenfield SAP S/4HANA environment. RISE on AWS presented a compelling construct because it allowed Arc’teryx to focus on solving business requirements rather than operate a big IT team. Given the very tight business timelines, Arc’teryx was able to move to SAP S/4HANA with RISE on AWS in under 2 weeks. Today, Arc’teryx has successfully replaced their home-grown ERP environment with SAP S/4HANA and are running SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR) and Apparel Fashion Add-on (AFS) as part of their RISE deployment. As a next step, Arc’teryx plans to leverage the cloud to modernize their planning, allocations, and financial budgeting systems.

Grupo LALA

Grupo LALA is a leader in the production and distribution of high-quality dairy products in Mexico, US, Central America and Brazil. The company was looking for a platform that would support its growth strategy and continued expansion into new dairy food categories. The company landed on RISE to accelerate and simplify its journey to SAP S/4HANA cloud. With 31 plants and 173 Distribution Centers, it was critical for Grupo LALA to select a RISE cloud provider that can support both its SAP and non-SAP solutions across finance, human resources, production, distribution and logistics processes, and ensure secure, real time connectivity with its core SAP S/4HANA environment. After an exhaustive search process and RFP, the company chose AWS to host both its RISE with SAP (starting with Brazil) and non-SAP environments. As a next step in their digital transformation journey, Grupo LALA will increase RISE’s footprint across its SAP landscape and explore AWS’s native ML, AI, and Analytics cloud services to drive deeper insights and more value from its SAP landscape.

Integrated Micro-Electronics, Inc. (IMI)

IMI is a leading global technology and manufacturing company headquartered in the Philippines and specializing in highly reliable electronics in the automotive, aerospace, and industrial market. The company was running an on-premise SAP environment on legacy hardware that was not supporting the company’s supply chain expansion plans and growth trajectory. IMI engaged executives from across the various businesses and developed a multi-year digital transformation roadmap that included modernizing its SAP environment and moving it to the cloud with RISE. IMI -which operates 21 manufacturing sites across 10 countries- had been originally running some of their home-grown enterprise solution on AWS using Amazon Aurora. IMI chose AWS for its RISE environment to ensure it brings that same level of cloud agility, flexibility, and reliability they were accustomed to running their home-grown solutions to their SAP environment. Moving to RISE on AWS has helped IMI accelerate the generation of business reports such as Trial Balances and Material Documents to business decision makers. In terms of next steps, IMI plans to modernize their Product Lifecycle Management solution and leverage AWS native services such as AWS Datalake and AWS IoT Services to modernize their manufacturing processes.

PPG

PPG is a global manufacturer of paints, coatings, and specialty materials and a Fortune 250 company with headquarters in Pittsburgh, USA and operations in more than 75 countries. After going through a series of strategic acquisitions and divestures over the years, the company was left with multiple disparate ERP systems. In an effort to accelerate the integration of its acquisitions and continue to deliver value to its shareholders -PPG is one of a very small number of companies that has extended its dividends for more than 120 years and increased them for more than 50 years – the company decided to move their SAP S/4HANA environment from SAP HEC to RISE. PPG chose AWS to host its RISE environment because of the AWS global infrastructure that serves 30 geographic regions around the world – including countries where PPG has significant business that are not served by other RISE cloud providers. Looking ahead, PPG plans to continue its accelerated data center exit that they started a year ago moving workloads across 8 data centers on to AWS, while at the same time consolidating their multiple SAP and non-SAP ERP instances on to SAP S/4HANA on AWS through the RISE offering.

and many more…

More AWS customers from across the globe such as Ballance Agri Nutrients, a farmer owned co-operative offering science-based nutrient products and services based in New Zealand, FINN, a car subscription company making mobility fun and sustainable based in Germany, Klimasan, a manufacturing company offering a complete range of solutions for the plug-in commercial refrigeration market headquartered in Turkey, and Tevva, a hydrogen-electric and battery-electric vehicle manufacturer based in the UK, all chose RISE on AWS to modernize their ERP environments and transform their business processes.

Looking ahead – 2023 and beyond

72% of SAP customers surveyed in the October 2022 SAPinsider RISE Benchmark report that were considering RISE had timelines that were 6-12 months out providing an early indicator that 2023 will be yet another eventful year for ERP cloud transformations. At AWS, we continue to be customer obsessed in our efforts to support our customers embarking on the RISE journey. Customers considering RISE in 2023 can look forward to taking advantage of our collaboration with SAP along with recently announced AWS services and functionality like the SAP Private Link Service that allows customers to establish private connectivity between selected SAP BTP services and native AWS services, the SAP and AWS joint reference architecture that enables customers to extend their SAP environment using SAP BTP and AWS native services, the newly released AWS SDK for SAP ABAP -currently in developer preview- that allows SAP developers to modernize and transform SAP-based business processes by connecting to AWS services directly using the SAP ABAP language, and our technical co-innovation with SAP to enable AWS’s Graviton 3 processors to support the SAP HANA Cloud for increased price-performance, reliability, and sustainability.

To learn more about how AWS can help you with your own RISE journey visit us at thinkwithwp.com/sap and check out the SAP and AWS alliance page.