EGIC Migrates SAP to AWS with Phoenix Consulting to Support Growth and Transformation

It was clear to EGIC’s group chief information officer (CIO) Amr Zaid that it was time for a change. EGIC had ambitious plans to expand across the globe. To achieve that, he knew that he needed an infrastructure that could support the company’s SAP solution on multiple fronts and in multiple territories. He also knew he needed a partner he could trust. Amr Zaid had worked with Phoenix on a number of previous projects and wanted to use its expertise in both AWS and SAP.

EGIC had been running its SAP Enterprise Resource Planning Central Component (ECC) solution on premises since 2013. The company makes 15–20 million deliveries each month, but it recognized that it needed to migrate to the cloud to support its plans for growth. In addition to a more stable SAP system, Amr Zaid wanted to improve the way teams in the company’s geographically disparate facilities collaborated. EGIC also wanted to improve its security posture and its disaster recovery capability, and to free its IT team from maintenance tasks. Finally, it needed to drive down investment in hardware across the organization.

The route to success was clear. But EGIC and Phoenix knew that careful planning of the migration to the cloud would be critical to its success. EGIC has four different environments and wanted a resilient and meticulously tested plan that would give it the confidence that it could press ahead with the migration without affecting its everyday operations. The two companies decided to develop a detailed, phased approach and tested it thoroughly. “One reason we chose Phoenix is because they pay attention to the details,” says Amr Zaid. “They invested the time with us to plan all the details and to ensure that everything was perfect.”

Phoenix used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to help plan the migration and demonstrate the outcomes. “MAP helps to accelerate the cloud migration and modernization journey on AWS with an outcome-driven methodology,” says Ahmed Abdelhady, executive manager at Phoenix Consulting. “The outputs were an important factor in EGIC’s decision making.” EGIC’s SAP system now runs on Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, which provides a significant discount of up to 72 percent compared to on-demand pricing and provides a capacity reservation when used in a specific AWS Availability Zone. Meanwhile, the company uses Amazon CloudWatch to observe and monitor resources and applications on AWS and on premises for its Saudi Arabian facility.

Thanks to the careful planning, the migration to AWS was achieved over a 3-day weekend with less than the 4 hours of planned downtime. EGIC’s factory connections to SAP are now secure and stable, and its Oracle database query response times have been reduced from 10 minutes to just 30 seconds—a 95 percent improvement. IT total cost of ownership is down 20 percent and hardware support, maintenance, and upgrade costs have been reduced by 100 percent. Since the migration to AWS, EGIC has also reported a 20 percent improvement in system uptime and performance. Now that EGIC’s SAP system is running smoothly on AWS, Amr Zaid and his team are ready for the next steps in their transformation journey, confident that the infrastructure is more secure and can scale as needed. With the IT team freed from routine infrastructure tasks, it can instead focus on innovation initiatives and on building a shared services operation to support all of EGIC’s factories from one location in Egypt.

EGIC can now use data insights to improve its productivity, save money, and be more efficient. It has seen a 20 percent improvement in business process reporting using near real-time data and connected systems. And it has ambitious plans to build an intelligent, fully digital inventory and supply chain system for its factories. This will improve productivity and ROI and will also enable easier, more accurate audits and environmental insights. One project is to transform the factory in Saudi Arabia from on-premises solution to SAP on AWS. Another major initiative is to upgrade its ECC application to SAP S/4HANA to deliver real-time analytics and to benefit from S/4HANA’s intuitive Fiori user interface for its finance, supply chain, and manufacturing operations.

For these projects, EGIC will turn to Phoenix as a trusted collaborator and for its deep SAP and AWS expertise. “Transformation projects are hard,” says Amr Zaid. “Moving from on premises to the cloud is not easy, especially with a sophisticated application like SAP. But Phoenix’s deep understanding of our business and expertise with SAP and AWS services meant we could migrate with confidence. I’m looking forward to the future.”