Cloud4C Helps Falcon Pack Modernize Manufacturing Using SAP on AWS

Food packaging provider Falcon Pack migrated from its legacy on-premises system SAGE ERP to a greenfield SAP ERP system on AWS to support the company’s rapid growth. When stores and restaurants across the Middle East region closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Falcon Pack also needed to shift from serving just its existing B2B clients to serving B2C customers as well. Running SAP S/4HANA on AWS, and working with AWS partner Cloud4C, the company modernized its manufacturing processes, cut costs through a consumption-based model, and gained a better understanding of its B2C customers through the data it was able to collect and analyze with the new system. It also saved significant management time through automation, allowing business owners to focus more on growing the business and improving operations.

Falcon Pack is a leading manufacturer and distributor of disposable food packaging products in the Middle East region. The company has more than 4,000 diversified products and manufacturing and distributing facilities throughout the UAE, with branches in Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. Falcon Pack had a pressing need to serve B2C as well as existing B2B clients after the shift in demand brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Accomplishing this effectively meant Falcon Pack had to move away from its legacy on-premises SAGE ERP system to a new greenfield SAP implementation running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the significant growth of the company over the past few years, the existing on-premises infrastructure was facing issues around web performance, flexibility, and scalability. In addition, Falcon Pack needed improved data collection capabilities to better understand customer buying behaviors and needs.

In 2019, Falcon Pack decided to migrate to an enterprise-grade ERP platform, selecting SAP S/4HANA, including the success factors, cloud analytics, and customer experience solutions. The company’s initial plan was to upgrade the on-premises system. But Falcon Pack was wary of buying new hardware and being tied into a specific system for the future when it was difficult to predict what would be needed.

Falcon Pack chose AWS as its cloud provider because of its responsiveness, speed, and performance, in addition to its reputation, reliability, and scalability.

Falcon Pack worked with AWS partner Cloud4C on the assessment and migration of SAP workloads from an on-premises data center to the AWS facility in Bahrain, with disaster recovery managed by AWS in Ireland. Cloud4C seamlessly migrated customer workloads and implemented an AWS Well-Architected framework, incorporating high availability and disaster recovery.

With regards to the disaster recovery provision, Cloud4C achieved cost-effectiveness with cross-region backup replication for apps, and database replication using lighter virtual machines. This solution kept costs down to approximately 30 percent of what Falcon Pack would have paid for fully migrated systems in the cloud, freeing up funds to invest in other improvements. The time to market was also reduced with the rapid provisioning provided by AWS.

Falcon Pack uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity and Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) for block storage at any scale. In addition, Falcon Pack’s technical team can monitor all aspects of customer instances with Amazon CloudWatch, through which they can observe all AWS resources and applications.

By running SAP S/4HANA on AWS, Falcon Pack has a solution that can scale for periods of peak activity. Likewise, during quiet periods, the organization can scale down capacity to manage costs in a way that was not possible with the previous on-premises setup.

Customer experience data and instances are integrated with SAP S/4HANA on premises with full host-to-host connection with Emirates NBD Bank. Efficiency improvements mean the project sponsor, Ahmed Al Shamsi, who previously had to provide numerous authorizations per day, can now simply select and approve transactions in seconds. This saves a significant amount of time each day, freeing up senior management time for planning and decision making.

Working with Cloud4C, Falcon Pack is moving towards the next phase of manufacturing integration and intelligence running on SAP and AWS, delivering the predictive analyses, maintenance intelligence, and performance metrics that will enable further automation and dynamic scheduling within the business, including in the factories spread across UAE.

Time savings are not limited to senior roles, with production managers also seeing benefits. “Vastly improved manpower and machine scheduling has resulted in faster, more accurate planning, increased agility, and a reduction of time spent in the execution of production, too,” says Syed Ehtisham, senior manager for IT at Falcon Pack. “With the help of SAP production planning and detailed scheduling, that process is now automated, saving product managers an enormous amount of time, which they can deploy on checking for quality, efficiencies, and improvements in other parts of the operations.”