The Erawan Group migrates Oracle ERP to AWS, boosting performance 25%

To realize its digital transformation goals, Erawan needed to reevaluate its IT infrastructure. The company’s key systems depended on costly data center hardware that was difficult to maintain and secure. The aging environment supporting its legacy Oracle JD Edwards ERP system was impacting uptime and performance. More broadly, the on-premises setup was too inflexible to support analytics or adopt new technologies, such as AI or robotic process automation (RPA).

As an initial step, Erawan aimed to migrate its ERP to the cloud and lay the foundation for becoming a cloud-first company. Naroot Chankitisakoon, senior vice president of digital transformation at Erawan Group, states, “Cloud was our route to modernizing IT and creating a foundation to support the latest and next-generation technologies.” The group started searching for a cloud provider that could support its modernization efforts and ensure compliance with Thailand's data residency regulations.

Erawan selected AWS for its track record as a cloud provider globally and in Thailand. “AWS offered a solid cloud foundation that could support our short, medium, and long-term technology roadmap and the eventual integration of AI and RPA,” says Chankitisakoon. The launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region also gave Erawan the chance to host its ERP with full compliance while reducing latency securely.

To accelerate the migration, Erawan worked with AWS Partner Metro Systems Corporation (MSC). The partner supported Erawan on multiple proof of concepts (POC) to validate the reliability and speed of performance of the ERP on AWS. Working with AWS, the partner also created the design for the ERP’s AWS environment and led the execution of the cloud migration. “MSC made the migration a success,” says Chankitisakoon. “Our IT team appreciated the expertise and effort MSC put into the POCs and sharing its knowledge.”

Erawan migrated its Oracle JD Edwards system to quick-to-scale Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Microsoft Windows Server instances. It also adopted Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to retain the familiar file system while still benefiting from the cloud’s scalability and resilience. Lastly, it moved from its legacy storage to high-performance Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), which provides the low-latency, consistent storage needed for demanding ERP systems.

Thanks to MSC’s expertise and collaboration, Erawan completed the entire migration project within 3 months—ahead of schedule. The ERP system’s 150-plus users across its hotels experienced minimal disruption to their workdays and continued to pull their reports without interruption. “Because of all our preparation, the migration went smoothly. We had no latency issues or any other issues following the cutover,” states Chankitisakoon.

By migrating its ERP to AWS, Erawan increased system performance by 25 percent, ensuring executives gain access to more timely data for better decision-making. Additionally, the group improved the system’s reliability, increasing uptime to 99.99 percent, while achieving a 40 percent cost saving. Given the seriousness of downtime, Erawan successfully reduced the time to restore services after a disaster from 48 hours to 3 hours—almost 94 percent.

Crucially, the group eliminated the hurdles toward digital transformation and freed up resources to drive progress. What’s more, IT staff reduced infrastructure management workloads by 29 percent, releasing time for them to focus on innovation. The IT team now plans to use AWS services and partner support to develop a data lake and warehouse with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Redshift. The team is also keen to explore generative AI and agentic AI use cases using Amazon Bedrock. “With our secure and scalable IT foundation on AWS and the backing of MSC, we can realize the power of AI to transform our business,” says Chankitisakoon.