Dafgårds Reduces Response Times by 55% by Migrating SAP Workloads to AWS with Pearl Group

Dafgårds, founded in 1937, is a third-generation family firm and one of Sweden’s largest food processors and manufacturers. It makes everything from meatballs and ready meals to pan pizza. It employs 1,300 people and exports products all around the world. It has been using SAP since 1999 hosted in its own data center. Moving to SAP on AWS provides Dafgårds with much more flexibility. It can implement new solutions more quickly and in a more secure way than it could using its on-premises data center.

Swedish food manufacturer Dafgårds wanted to upgrade its on-premises SAP systems to S/4HANA and saw this as a good opportunity to also make a strategic move to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to innovate faster and create more value for the business. It also wanted to be able to adapt more quickly to business and market needs.

Dafgårds staff attended the AWS Summit in 2019 but also considered the other big providers. “We could clearly see that AWS had the strength, skills, and experience in manufacturing that we needed,” says Fredrik Dafgård, chief digital officer at Dafgårds. “Because we are a family firm, we were able to make a quick decision.” Learning about the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which helps to accelerate the cloud migration and modernization journey with an outcome-driven methodology, was an important factor in Dafgårds’ decision making. “MAP was the tipping point. We could see this was a big opportunity and the investment to build the proof of concept was very important to us.” says Daniel Stenmark, chief information officer, at Dafgårds.

Choosing the right partner to help with the migration was more difficult. Dafgårds considered several companies before choosing AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and SAP Competency Partner Pearl Group. “They have an informal culture, like us, and make decisions fast,” says Stenmark, chief information officer at Dafgårds. “The team really felt like the perfect fit with our culture.”

The migration coincided with the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, and almost all work was done remotely. Although the move to AWS was straightforward, upgrading to SAP S/4HANA was challenging, and done in methodical steps.

The migration meant big changes for Dafgårds’ IT employees—it freed them from maintenance and infrastructure tasks, giving them time to focus on adding business value. “They asked us some tough questions about the need to migrate and that really helped us to make the business case clear,” says Stenmark. “In the end, we were all surprised at the performance improvements. And we have freed staff from infrastructure tasks so they can spend more time on security and improving systems. The staff have really embraced the change and is learning more and more about AWS services.”

The system is costing 20 percent less than was estimated in the business case prepared for management, and Dafgårds is confident that optimization work already underway will push costs even lower. The company no longer has to wait for servers and can easily spin up resources for test environments as required.

Performance and availability have improved—previously, systems had to be shut down for up to 48 hours to upgrade, which impacted manufacturing that normally continues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Users have been impressed by performance improvements. Average response times for application server dialog tasks have been reduced by approximately 35 percent, and average response times for database dialog tasks have been reduced by about 55 percent.

An unexpected benefit was a 60 percent cut in backup costs by using AWS Backint Agent, which backs up SAP HANA workloads to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Reliable offsite backup is important because almost all Dafgårds manufacturing takes place on one site. Cooking food and baking bread brings risks and the move to AWS is part of the business continuity plan of reducing the potential impact of fire incidents.

The company’s immediate focus is on optimizing existing systems and getting the most business benefit it can out of the move to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori—a design system to ease development of business applications for analytics and deeper use of business data.