AWS for Industries

How AWS Can Help CPG Companies Gain Value from SAP Investments

According to the Top 10 Consumer Packaged Goods Software Vendors, Market Size and Market Forecast 2020-2025, “SAP led the pack with 12.1% market share riding on a 2.4% jump in consumer packaged goods license, maintenance, and subscription revenues.” Some big names make up that 12.1% market share, such as Dole, Del Monte, Swire Coca-Cola, The Kellogg Company, Under Armour, and E&J Gallo Winery, and every one of these companies run their SAP environments on AWS.

You may be asking, “Why is that? Why are these global brands choosing AWS to run their SAP applications?” In this blog, we’ll explain the key reasons why AWS is the platform of choice for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies who run SAP applications.

Proven Environment for SAP Applications

First and foremost, AWS has been supporting SAP in the cloud since 2008, and SAP customers in the cloud since 2011. This long history of collaboration led ISG, a global research firm, to name AWS as an “ISG Provider Lens leader” for SAP HANA infrastructure services for the fourth year in a row. ISG specifically named these benefits for SAP customers:

  • AWS Launch Wizard: It streamlines the provisioning and deployment process of SAP applications.
  • SAP-AWS certified cloud infrastructure: With this certification, CPG companies can be rest assured that SAP systems are optimized for top-notch performance on AWS.
  • More client choices: We offer the broadest set of services to innovate and transform your business by combining your SAP investments with 200+ AWS services including analytics, IoT, cloud service options, tools for backing-up, archiving, encrypting SAP data, as well as an extensive network of AWS SAP Competency Partners.

Multiple Options to Migrate SAP Applications to AWS

Regardless of where your company is in its cloud journey, AWS will meet you where you are. If your company is well-established and has been serving consumers for decades, then you can do a “lift and shift” of your SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) environment to the AWS Cloud. You can also migrate directly to SAP S/4HANA, or you can do a phased migration that moves some workloads to SAP HANA, while other workloads stay on SAP ECC for a period of time. On the other hand, if you’re launching a new digital-native brand or testing a direct-to-consumer (DTC) initiative, you can quickly spin up a new SAP environment on AWS.

Vetted, Experienced SAP on AWS Partners

Our vast partner network offers deep SAP expertise to help with any of your SAP migrations or AWS Cloud implementation needs. In fact, our AWS SAP Competency Partners go through a rigorous vetting process to ensure they understand both AWS and SAP technologies, including the AWS Well-Architected Framework. We also make sure that our SAP Competency Partners have a proven track record of successful SAP-on-AWS implementations.

Purpose-built SAP Tools

Our development teams have created specific tools to help ease the administrative burden on your IT department so they can focus on more strategic activities. As we mentioned before, the AWS Launch Wizard streamlines the provisioning and deployment processes of SAP HANA-based applications in AWS Cloud. It also helps identify the right resources and provides the estimated cost to deploy and run your SAP applications. And to speed future deployments, AWS Launch Wizard can create AWS CloudFormation templates. The AWS Backint Agent helps CPG companies backup SAP HANA databases to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). You can use SAP tools, such as SAP HANA Cockpit and SAP HANA Studio, to restore your database. There’s no cost to use this tool, and it’s available in all commercial AWS Cloud Regions.

The Most Secure, Reliable Cloud Provider

Our cloud infrastructure meets more than 90 security standards and compliance certifications with 25% more security features than other providers. The AWS Cloud global footprint provides CPG companies with access to 26 Regions and 84 Availability Zones across the 245 countries and territories. Our global cloud infrastructure means CPG brands with operations around the world enjoy better reliability and less downtime.

SAP on AWS in the CPG Industry

AWS has a proven record of success in the CPG industry. We’ve helped both long-established companies and cloud-native brands transform and modernize their SAP environments, gain more agility and value from their SAP investments, and accelerate innovation with their SAP solutions. Here are a few examples:

  • Revlon: After soaring ecommerce sales, this 90-year-old cosmetics company is making a strategic move to the cloud to boost its digital capabilities. Revlon is using the RISE with SAP program to modernize its back-office infrastructure, applications, and processes while reducing IT expenses. Read the press release here.
  • Coca-Cola Andina: With SAP as its core business system, this South American Coke products distributor wanted to gain more value and insights from its data. The company decided to deploy an AWS data lake as its single source of data for its SAP ERP system, CSV files, and other legacy databases because the architecture was “easy to access, with reliable data and no limits on storage, response or processing capacity.” Read the case study here.
  • Under Armour: This popular global athletic apparel brand selected AWS as its cloud provider of choice for the company’s SAP environments to “increase resilience, enhance security, and provide more significant insights across its business.” Under Amour completed its AWS Cloud migration in less than six months. Read the press release here.

Read Our New SAP on AWS Ebook

If you’d like to learn more about how AWS can help you gain more value from your SAP investment, download and read our new ebook, Transform your SAP Landscape with AWS.

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David Ahuja

David Ahuja

David Ahuja leads AWS’s Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry strategy and is responsible for developing CPG industry solutions that enable customers to accelerate innovation to achieve their business goals. He helps CPG customers automate manufacturing processes, optimize supply chains, and transform consumer engagements. David brings 30+ years of CPG and retail experience and has led global merchandising and supply chain analytics for Walmart Labs. He also spent 23 years at Procter & Gamble where he led business transformation in marketing & sales and data & analytics across the US and Latin America. David earned his bachelor’s degree in Information Systems from the University of Cincinnati and his MBA from Loyola of Maryland. He is originally from Belize, Central America and now lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Steven Kim

Steven Kim

Steven Kim is the global head of ERP solutions at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Utilizing his SAP expertise combined with Amazon’s industry leading cloud technologies, he helps customers find ways to accelerate innovation and develop new products or services. Before joining AWS, Steven led an innovation team at SAP and drove customer adoption of new digital technologies such as IoT, SAP Manufacturing Network, Robotics, Blockchain, and Augmented Reality. Prior to this role, Steven held various leadership roles in product management, product marketing, and business development at SAP and Oracle. Steven is an industry veteran, starting his career over 25 years ago working with manufacturing and supply chain planning systems. He has many years of direct experience designing and implementing supply chain, procurement and business network solutions in various industries and has a keen interest in applying network based approach to solve complex supply and demand problems. He has worked with many High-Tech, Aerospace & Defense, Healthcare, Automotive, and Consumer Product companies in USA, Europe, and Asia. Steven is based in Palo Alto, CA.