Fielmann and Netlution Move Complex SAP Estate to AWS

Fielmann is a leading German and central European retail optician. It originally planned to lift and shift its SAP workloads from its own data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive innovation, security, and scalability. The project evolved to include some re-engineering of business processes to achieve the desired results. With retail systems running across several countries, Fielmann recruited AWS Partner Netlution to help manage the migration with minimal impact on stores serving its 27 million customers.

Fielmann has a network of over 900 stores across Europe, providing over 27 million customers with glasses, contact lenses, and hearing aids. With sales of just under €2 billion, it relies on 11 SAP system landscapes to keep track of accounts and retail performance. Many business processes run across several SAP systems. But it was outgrowing its existing on-premises data center. While performance was still reasonable, Fielmann wanted the flexibility and improved ability to innovate from moving to the cloud.

It considered a complete rebuild of the data center but quickly realized that it would be difficult to achieve the required level of physical security, because the center is in its headquarters office. Building a certifiable center would also be prohibitively expensive.

Fielmann wanted to move to a cloud-first strategy to reduce the costs and management overheads of running its own data center. But it also wanted better performance, greater agility, and improved flexibility and security. Moving to AWS meant it could avoid the expensive upgrade and improve performance. Fielmann stores personal health data for its customers so it has the highest security standards. “To convert into a certifiable standard data center was too expensive, and physical security was also difficult. We wanted flexibility of the cloud and the high level of innovation and security that we knew we would get from AWS,” says Julian Grube, project leader for SAP cloud migration at Fielmann.

The team had 12 months to complete the move and needed to avoid any impact on the operation of stores, logistics, and back-end finance operations.

Fielmann realized it needed a partner to ensure moving SAP workloads to AWS went smoothly and it got the most value out of the project. It spoke to several service providers before settling on AWS Partner Netlution. Netlution had relevant experience on similar projects and the deep understanding of SAP on AWS that Fielmann needed.

Netlution is an AWS SAP Competency Partner, which means it has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven success in SAP implementation, migration, and innovation. “The atmosphere between us was really good right from the start and our cultures are very similar,” says Grube. “Netlution has the expertise in cloud and SAP and were always ready to support us. We also really liked its flat hierarchies, which meant we always had direct contact with the right people and decisions were made fast.”

The two companies held regular meetings with the SAP teams and business unit leaders so that everyone understood how the migrations would work in practice.

The original migration plan was for a relatively simple lift-and-shift migration of SAP workloads onto AWS. But it soon became clear that a more nuanced approach was required, needing substantially more work, including adjustments to system settings and IP addresses.

The two companies analyzed which connections to the SAP systems were established directly by IP in order to adjust them all before the migration. These were changed to DNS connections before the migration. The list of links was also used for test documentation and prioritized. Those with priority 1 were successfully tested before the live date. Those with lower priority were tested in the following week.

This meant all business processes had to be tested end-to-end before final sign off. All changes had to be made during quiet times for retailers. The move also required some databases to be re-engineered and reorganized.

Fielmann and Netlution have now successfully moved all SAP workloads to AWS. Fielmann saves money because its systems no longer need to run 24 hours a day. It uses AWS Systems Manager, which provides operational insights into AWS and on-premises resources. It is now much faster and easier for Fielmann to provision the capacity and cloud services as required.

Netlution also helped transfer the knowledge and skills Fielmann needs to get the most from its new systems. “Staff now have the necessary skills and understanding of SAP Basis operations on AWS,” says Grube. “In fact, we’ve gone further. It is a team that enables innovation and flexibility for the Fielmann business using AWS.”

Fielmann also uses AWS Professional Services and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) Service to improve SAP performance. The company now has the agility to rapidly innovate, automate infrastructure tasks, and improve operational response across its retail and digital channels.