PharmaOverseas Migrates to SAP on AWS for Reliability and Scalability with Phoenix Consulting

PharmaOverseas is a fast-growing business, which was creating a challenge for its IT department. The team needed to ensure systems could continually increase in order to have the capacity to cope with 50,000 deliveries per day using proprietary, on-premises systems.

PharmaOverseas relies on SAP as its main enterprise resource planning solution to keep track of its complex, time-sensitive inventory and billing for thousands of customers. Due to its fast growth—at least 50 percent per year but over 100 percent in 2023—its IT staff were constantly upgrading and growing the on-premises systems to cope with demand from the business. But with its systems reaching capacity, users had to accept SAP services being unavailable for at least some of the day.

The company had looked at several cloud providers and solutions before choosing AWS for SAP. The decision to choose AWS was based on its ability to deliver low latency and support over 1,400 simultaneous users. PharmaOverseas was also impressed by the ecosystem of third-party products available on AWS to support other business services like logistics and transport management.

Phoenix Consulting had already worked successfully on an archiving project for PharmaOverseas so was a natural choice to help migrate its SAP services to AWS. It used AWS Migration Acceleration Program to help with the project. “The whole migration was very smooth,” says Mohab Gazzarine, chief executive officer at PharmaOverseas. “Our databases grow by 100 GB a month and we have nearly 3,000 SAP users. This was a big project but Phoenix Consulting were highly professional and understood what our business needed—we had minimal downtime and no disruption to business.”

Phoenix Business Consulting migrated 4 TB of data to SAP S/4HANA on AWS with just 12 hours of planned downtime. Ahead of the migration, Phoenix Consulting cleaned stored data and reduced it from 5 TB to 2.5 TB. PharmaOverseas has already halved the number of racks it pays for in the data center and hopes to move remaining services including telephony to AWS within a year.

Systems are now more reliable and users enjoy 50 percent faster response times from SAP systems running on AWS compared to on premises. The company expects to save about 30 percent of total cost of ownership by using Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances but is equally pleased with the improvement in technical staff productivity now they are not working to keep systems running.

The company has better visibility into system performance and can much more quickly react to expand systems to cope with business growth. It has also been able to automate some business services, further improving productivity for IT staff.

Security has improved and so has connectivity—PharmaOverseas previously had to manage connections from four main warehouses and offices across Egypt to the central data center. Each location now maintains its own link to AWS, improving resilience. It has systems in place that can more easily integrate with additional services as the business requires them.

With the project complete, PharmaOverseas is next looking to add an AWS-hosted firewall to its systems and is evaluating fleet management solutions to help run its 800 delivery vehicles in a more efficient and environmentally friendly way.

The migration has freed the IT team from having to predict how much hardware it will need in 6 months’ time in order to cope with company growth. “Last year we grew by 105 percent, I can tell you that we could not have achieved that if we were still relying on on-premises systems,” says Gazzarine. “Staff no longer have the worry of watching performance begin to weaken as systems become saturated. If there is an issue, we can turn on more resources in seconds.”

Previously, users could find it difficult to contact systems, or find them unacceptably slow, for as much as half an hour per day. Now systems are available and respond quickly. “I no longer have this army of administrators managing the systems—now it’s one or two people,” says Gazzarine. “The performance for users is far better than it used to be. The only regret I have with this project is that I did not do it 4 years earlier.”