adidas Centralizes Global Core Business Operations through Innovative ERP on AWS

When adidas first implemented SAP decades ago, the company was operating exclusively as a wholesaler. By the early 2000s, the company had grown into a multibillion-dollar business in retail, ecommerce, and franchising, with a continual need to upgrade existing software. “We want to be cutting edge. In technology, we need to go the extra mile to excite our customers,” Meier says. “We can’t do that with a 20-year-old backbone. We face a transformation, with a unique chance for our software systems to renew the heart of the company.”

In November 2021, adidas selected AWS for its initiative to revolutionize global operations before 2027, when SAP will end support for the legacy ERP system. Perhaps fittingly for an athletics company, adidas views the project as a team endeavor. “On the field, there are a lot of different positions, and they need to work together,” says Meier. “We wanted the agility of the cloud to connect existing topics on ecommerce or analytics with SAP loads. We realized that we could use AWS to connect different dots on our landscape, not only hosting as a bare-metal offering but also offering other key functionalities.”

The company chose to use SAP S/4HANA on AWS to consolidate, simplify, and automate its three core ERP systems: Purchasing, Supply Chain Management and Finance, and Sales. It worked alongside AWS to test and validate each iteration.

Using native AWS services to drive innovation, adidas will deploy a fast, scalable system that consolidates data and provides centralized reporting for more than 650 business processes involving more than 75 TB of transactional data. The large S/4HANA instance behind the solution will rely on compute power from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. By May 2023, adidas was using Amazon EC2 to run 448 virtual CPUs and a 9-TB memory machine for more than 20 services. TRANS4RM featured 45 APIs in May 2023, nearly triple the number of APIs of its legacy systems. “We are not yet live, but we understand that we are hitting records on AWS in instance sizes, volume size, processing speed, memory, and CPUs,” says Meier. “AWS is our coach and facilitator—giving us the material we need to run it all, like trainers helping us to gear up. We give them feedback to help fine-tune the AWS offerings, and we know we can rely on AWS for the equipment and the training on where to best use it.” For example, adidas and AWS host upskilling sessions for developers. They are learning to use AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, an AWS software development kit that simplifies the use of SAP’s coding language, ABAP, and its integration with AWS services.

For its initial load, adidas loaded 9.4 billion financial transactions in 1 month into SAP S/4HANA on AWS. It must meet stringent requirements for backup and storage recovery. Since the start of the TRNS4RM project, it worked alongside AWS, SAP, and NetApp, an AWS Partner, to build an architecture to automate disaster recovery. Using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a fully managed shared storage built on NetApp’s ONTAP file system, adidas can quickly restore large HANA databases and load HANA data from disk to memory. Its recovery process time is 44 minutes, 59 percent faster than its service-level agreement mandate. “We see the sheer speed of the infrastructure,” Meier says. “We can restart and restore the system in an impressive amount of time.”

To monitor its stack—infrastructure, applications, network, and services—adidas uses Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights for SAP HANA and Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights for SAP NetWeaver. These applications use alarms, logs, and events data to take automated actions and reduce the time taken to recover from system failures. Project leaders who don’t require technical depth receive quick insights using SAP Solution Manager dashboards.

In November 2023, adidas Central Finance will go live, with plans to bring all areas of Finance and Purchasing live by 2024. “We are shaping the future of the heart and soul of our company, be it faster response times to consumer needs, better decision-making, or the capability to report in near real time,” Meier says. “We trust AWS to go through the journey with us as we get to each next round and complete the race.”