RISE with SAP on AWS delivers consumer goods innovation

Consumer goods (CG) companies are facing several challenges. For starters, technology-driven convenience has shifted consumers away from traditional in-person shopping experiences. Today’s on-demand online model caters to consumers’ specific tastes—from the comfort of their preferred devices. And new entrants to the market are offering more choices than ever before. To stay competitive, CG companies are investing in digital transformation, including modernizing their SAP systems.

Traditionally, companies have run SAP on premises to support their mission-critical business processes. However, these on-premises environments lack modern security capabilities and are rigid, expensive to maintain, difficult to scale, and unreliable. Additionally, combining data from SAP systems with other enterprise data sources can be cumbersome.

Access to accurate data across the entire business has become imperative. This is especially true given the push to automate and innovate with generative AI and unique enterprise data. Without the ability to unlock business insights, companies can’t gain a competitive marketplace advantage.

In this blog, we’ll explore modernization insights from adidas and Versuni use cases, as well as how CG companies are modernizing their SAP environments to reimagine their businesses. We’ll also introduce RISE with SAP and share the benefits of running RISE with SAP on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Adidas transforms its business using SAP S/4HANA on AWS

When global athletic manufacturer and retailer adidas first implemented SAP decades ago, the company was operating exclusively as a wholesaler. By the early 2000s, it had grown into a multibillion-dollar business—with a continual need to upgrade existing software.

“We want to be cutting edge,” said Dominik Meier, senior director of platform engineering at adidas. “We can’t do that with a 20-year-old backbone.”

To achieve its goals, adidas chose SAP S/4HANA on AWS to consolidate, simplify, and automate its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems: purchasing, supply chain management and finance, and sales. When complete, it will be one of the largest SAP S/4HANA installations in the world that’s built on AWS. Consolidating will provide centralized reporting and near real-time insights for more than 650 business processes involving more than 75 TB of transactional data.

“This is not a technology project, updating software and going from A to Z,” said Meier. “We are in the middle of a business transformation that will have a huge impact on the whole adidas landscape, from internal business teams all the way to our customers.”

Versuni reimagines its company using RISE with SAP on AWS

Versuni, formerly known as Philips Domestic Appliances, manufactures and sells small domestic appliances in more than 100 countries. When Versuni became a standalone company, it needed to migrate its global technical estate to the cloud in only 18 months—including more than 60 business apps and the company’s ERP solution.

“We looked at our environment, our systems, our ways of working, and our processes, and we saw that continuing the old ways would not help us become a new company,” said Marcel Bijl, cloud leader at Versuni. “We reimagined our company from scratch.”

Versuni envisioned a cloud-first approach on AWS as it planned a new way forward. To unify and simplify its systems, Versuni wanted to use RISE with SAP on AWS. After 18 months of planning and preparation, the company went live. The hard work was worth it: the resulting unified system was a success.

Introducing RISE with SAP

CG brands usually run their business on one or several versions of SAP. These SAP instances power manufacturing operations, end-to-end supply chains, organizational analytics, and more. By 2027, SAP has planned end of support for SAP ECC, its legacy ERP offering. RISE with SAP is a modern approach to ERP. It offers a managed cloud service with embedded intelligence, business insights, and advanced technologies.

As an end-to-end solution, RISE with SAP on AWS provides faster time to value and more flexibility. It includes cloud infrastructure; managed services; SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP, private edition; SAP Business Technology Platform; SAP Business Network; and SAP Signavio.

Why AWS + SAP?

Innovation, BTP services, and 200+ AWS native services
SAP customers are reimagining their business processes with the help of 80+ SAP business technology platform (BTP) services running on AWS—more than any other cloud provider. They also benefit from 200+ AWS services, including offerings for the latest in generative AI, automation, and analytics. SAP customers can also use the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP to easily integrate SAP with AWS native cloud services.

AWS and SAP are making it faster and easier for companies to apply generative AI to their core business data. Companies can simply use Amazon Bedrock models in the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core. With this integration, SAP customers can apply generative AI faster and modernize key business processes built on SAP solutions.

Performance
Thousands of customers have selected RISE with SAP on AWS to run their largest, most complex global SAP solution implementations. Now generally available, the next-generation Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) High Memory U7i instances offer up to 32 TB of memory in a single instance. They also give customers the memory and flexibility they need to support expanding SAP HANA database requirements. These instances are the first DDR5 memory-based, eight-socket offering from a leading cloud provider to improve the performance of memory-intensive applications, such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of RISE with SAP.

SAP uses AWS Graviton3 chips to support SAP HANA Cloud. The chips increase performance gains, cost savings, and energy efficiency for SAP. By using Graviton3-based (EC2) instances, SAP has realized up to 30-percent better compute for analytical workloads—and an estimated 45-percent reduction in carbon footprint for SAP HANA Cloud. SAP and AWS are collaborating on the next generation, Graviton4, to continue improving performance and efficiency. Based on its successful collaborations with AWS, SAP plans to use AWS Graviton to support SAP solutions and applications, such as SAP BTP, SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Cloud ALM.

Security
AWS is architected to be the world’s most secure cloud computing environment available today. It is secure enough for top-secret workloads, supports 143 security standards and compliance certifications, and has been powering SAP NS2—a secure SAP cloud—significantly longer than other cloud providers. While not specific to RISE with SAP, a 2022 study from the Hackett Group found that companies that migrated their enterprise applications from on premises to AWS experienced a 45-percent reduction in security incidents.

Reliability
AWS is the only cloud provider that offers as many Regions, with three or more Availability Zones, connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking. Gartner recommends the AWS Region and Availability Zone model for running enterprise applications requiring high availability. A recent IDC study also found that SAP S/4HANA customers who migrated from on-premises infrastructure to AWS experienced a 58% decrease in costly unplanned downtime.

Getting started

Now is an ideal time to start your cloud journey. With support from AWS, you can accelerate your business transformation, maximize performance, prevent disruptions, and innovate faster. As the trusted cloud for RISE with SAP, AWS has powered SAP cloud-based applications for over 16 years. Hundreds of consumer goods companies have migrated with this support—and now your company can, too.

Download this ebook to learn more or attend an RISE with SAP on AWS Best Practices session.