Redington Gulf Helps Tania Water Cut IT Infrastructure Spend by 20% Using SAP on AWS

Tania Water provides high-quality bottled water to shops across Saudi Arabia. To support growth, the company needed to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs for bottle production, water filling, and distribution. It turned to AWS Partner Redington Gulf to move key SAP workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Together they reduced its total spend on IT infrastructure, boosted staff productivity, and improved business operations.

Founded in 2004, Tania Water manufactures, bottles, and supplies drinking water to small- and medium-sized retailers and hypermarkets in Saudi Arabia. It is one of the country’s market leaders in bottled water supply, which it has achieved in the face of high competition and very low margins. The company has grown rapidly by consistently providing water of high quality and delivering exceptional levels of customer service.

Tania Water previously managed business operations using SAP applications hosted on premises. However, the systems were costly to maintain and the aging servers proved increasingly slow for running business-critical processes. To reduce costs, increase operational agility, and free up time for its IT staff to focus on core business objectives, the company wanted to migrate to the cloud.

The company turned to AWS Partner Redington Gulf to help with the transition. “We knew AWS had good support for SAP and we needed a strong partner to help us move to the cloud without incident,” says Hani Hegazi, IT director at Tania Water. “Redington Gulf’s successful record of migrating SAP workloads to AWS gave us the confidence that we could achieve that together.”

Redington Gulf began with a lift-and-shift migration of Tania Water’s SAP workloads to SAP on AWS, the platform of choice and innovation for more than 5,000 SAP customers. The workloads included the company’s sales and distribution function, financial control, and material management. Tania and Redington completed the move in 10 weeks, using AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which accelerates cloud migrations and modernization journeys with an outcome-driven methodology.

Redington Gulf helped Tania optimize each SAP workload for the cloud to reduce costs across the business in line with a mandate from the company’s senior management. In addition, the company now pays only for the compute resources it needs. This helped the company reduce infrastructure expenditure as a percentage of the total IT budget by 20 percent. Tania also cut hardware maintenance costs by 10 percent, because its IT staff no longer perform time-consuming maintenance tasks such as upgrades and patches.

Tania Water has also reduced costs for data storage. For backup, it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), oobject storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. For production and to improve both input/output operations and application performance, it uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), which provides easy-to-use, high-performance block storage. “Tania Water was keen to improve performance and cut expenditure across the board,” says Vidyasagar Barapati, solutions architect at Redington Gulf. “We worked closely with them so they could see where costs—including hidden ones—could be eliminated or reduced.”

Tania Water now runs a more efficient manufacturing operation. Using SAP on AWS, it’s easier for retail customers to keep sales and inventory data up to date because AWS services’ availability allows data input at any time. This has improved the accuracy of Tania Water’s demand forecasting by over 20 percent. “Because we can more accurately predict product demand, we can adjust production levels in our bottling plants accordingly,” says Hegazi. “This minimizes production excesses or shortfalls, so our customers always get what they need in the most efficient way.”

The company can also more quickly test and evaluate SAP modules, such as for warehouse management, invoicing, and billing, so business users know which ones are most valuable to them. In addition, the IT team can spin up the necessary infrastructures in minutes instead of several days using Amazon EBS snapshots. “We now have a testing environment that is much more responsive to the needs of the business,” says Hegazi. “Staff productivity has increased by 5 percent and business teams can get the tools they need in a timely manner.” 

With Redington’s help, Tania Water has also reduced its risk of data loss by scheduling hourly snapshots of its data volumes using Amazon EBS.

Tania Water has increased overall platform availability to 99.9 percent using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. The company can also instantly procure SUSE licenses from AWS Marketplace to further speed up setup of new SAP production environments.

Following the success of migrating to SAP on AWS with Redington Gulf, the company plans to migrate more workloads to AWS. This includes implementing a disaster recovery solution built on AWS Regions and Availability Zones.

Working with Redington Gulf has helped keep Tania Water on target for all stages of its SAP migration. “Thanks to Redington Gulf, we have dramatically improved overall operational efficiency after moving our SAP workloads to AWS,” says Hegazi. “They met our needs and exceeded our expectations in a very effective way.”