Super Retail Group Enhances the Customer Experience by Moving SAP to the AWS Cloud

Super Retail Group (SRG) is Australia's seventh largest retailer today, boasting a turnover of AUD$3.45 billion in 2020. It sells a range of automotive, outdoor and leisure, and sporting brands in 698 stores across Australia and New Zealand.

SRG operates both physical and online stores, and its virtual store sales hit a peak in 2020 as customers bought products online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, its legacy on-premises IT infrastructure was impacting its ability to keep up with surging online demand and deliver a great customer experience – users were impacted by slow page load times during major events like Black Friday and Boxing Day.

SRG saw an opportunity to quickly transform its IT by moving to the cloud. With Lemongrass, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner and SAP on AWS Competency Partner, SRG successfully migrated and upgraded its 21 SAP applications to the AWS Cloud to simplify and automate its operations for business agility.

In late 2019, SRG had engaged Lemongrass for its SAP migration to the AWS Cloud to boost its online retail capabilities. Lemongrass began the migration in March 2020 and completed it in April 2021 – all while keeping SRG’s key customer relationship management, sales, enterprise resources, and accounting systems running.

Currently, SRG is able to increase its computing capacity for SAP systems within an hour to handle sales spikes and maintain business continuity with 99.95 percent platform uptime.

Ben Seivl, general manager, strategy and architecture, at SRG, says that the company can now easily scale its cloud infrastructure to support major online events, when it used to take months just to procure new hardware.

“Shortly after we completed the migration, we were able to quickly double our infrastructure capacity over 5 days to support a big online sale. We had good results and received plenty of positive feedback! It was one of our most well-executed high volume sales to date. Now, we can scale up at an affordable cost and eliminate idle capacity,” Seivl says.

SRG has also improved automation and development speed, exploiting the capabilities from its SAP migration.

To boost SRG’s DevOps environment, Lemongrass added 800 CPUs using a range of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types to optimize memory and compute capacity for its SAP systems. Lemongrass also used AWS Lambda to automatically process event triggers from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and AWS Connect to automate customer services, track tasks to completion, and monitor issues resolution.

“Customers expect instantaneous transactions and any impact to their online retail experience could damage SRG’s reputation. With our proprietary Near Zero Downtime technology and method, we migrated SRG’s large SAP systems – including its 37 TB enterprise resources (SAP ECC) and 12 TB SAP customer relationship management (CRM) databases – with no operational disruption or impact to the customer experience,” says Jason Nicholl, executive vice president for Asia Pacific at Lemongrass.

Ecommerce, which contributes around 12 percent of total sales volumes, is also helping to drive higher foot traffic and keep SRG’s physical stores open. Around 50 percent of customers choose to ‘click and collect’ their online orders in stores, which are used for order fulfilment.

Seivl explains that the SAP migration has opened up new opportunities for operational agility. “With the migration of our SAP systems to the AWS Cloud, we have now fully automated our Point-of-Sale (POS) test environment. We can deploy changes in minutes across locations and reduce overall POS development time from weeks to days, which is a fantastic outcome for a retailer,” says Sievl.

SRG is currently building up its team of internal experts to continue developing IT capabilities and transforming its business operations with the help of AWS and Lemongrass.

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