Paint Firm Is Primed for International Growth with SAP on AWS

With AWS, Śnieżka has lowered costs, freed up its IT team, and gained a scalable SAP environment to help it expand internationally. The company is the market leader in paints and varnishes in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Hungary. It worked with AWS APN Partner SE16N to build its AWS environment for SAP using AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, and Amazon Aurora.

Poland-based Śnieżka is the market leader in paints and varnishes in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Hungary. After rapid recent growth across Europe, Śnieżka realized it needed business processes to be better connected if the trend were to continue.

“Our enterprise resource planning software wasn’t well integrated with other systems like finance and warehouse management,” says Michał Suszka, director, SAP center of excellence at Śnieżka. “We wanted software that could connect these processes end-to-end, as well as cost-effective hosting that could scale easily as we grew.”

Śnieżka contacted Warsaw-based SE16N, AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, to help design and set up a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. “We also wanted a partner to manage the system,” says Suszka, “leaving our 15-strong IT team to focus on innovation.”

SE16N and Śnieżka chose AWS—not least because of its high availability and flexibility. “This was a completely new environment, so sizing was difficult,” explains Sebastian Biedroń, chief cloud architect at SE16N. “With AWS, we could resize instances once they were live to match workloads, rather than overcommit with large instances from the start.”

SE16N began building the day after Śnieżka decided on AWS. To speed up development, it used AWS CloudFormation templates and SE16N’s own AWS Lambda automations.

Śnieżka uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run applications including SAP S/4HANA for ERP and SAP Process Orchestration to manage processes between systems. Instead of a traditional database, Śnieżka uses Amazon Aurora, which offers up to 400 percent faster performance than MySQL databases at one-tenth of the cost of commercial products.

By running its development and test instances only when needed—around 50 hours a week—Śnieżka saves 70 percent of its running costs. And since it no longer maintains as many systems, Śnieżka’s SAP team can use its time more effectively. “We’ve recently built a new monitoring system,” says Suszka. “Without SE16N running SAP in the cloud, we couldn’t have delivered this project.”