Grove Group Implements SAP S/4HANA on AWS for Strategic Scaling

Vietnam is undergoing rapid digitalization, with the National Programme for Digital Transformation promoting productivity gains through the advancement of the digital economy. Grove Group was formed in 2020 to capitalize on this digital momentum.

The company has three divisions: retail, logistics, and distribution, which is the largest share of the business. Its vision is to become a leader in the specialized distribution market in Vietnam, including storage, warehousing, transportation, and reporting functions for its business customers.

Grove Group has invested heavily in a modern large-scale distribution system capable of serving more than 100,000 brick-and-mortar stores across the country. It also decided to invest strategically in world-class IT systems from the start to define a standardized set of best practices and governance controls. In January 2021, the company launched its distribution operations and at the same time chose SAP S/4HANA as its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Grove Group is committed to providing a stable, efficient distribution channel to help its business customers quickly reach their target market. It is the first company of its kind in Vietnam offering specialized distribution and logistics and is evolving rapidly to gain first-mover advantage.

The group quickly ruled out an on-premises implementation of SAP because procuring servers and supporting hardware components would have taken too long. Instead, it chose a cloud implementation to get to market with a strong ERP foundation as quickly as possible.

Grove Group engaged AWS Partner Deloitte to implement SAP S/4HANA and run the software for a year under a managed services contract, after which internal teams would take over day-to-day SAP operations. It considered various cloud providers to run SAP S/4HANA but decided on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ngo Tien Thinh, Commercial System Manager at Grove Group, says, “AWS offered a range of training courses to help my team learn about cloud technologies.”

After two weeks of discussions, Grove Group decided to move ahead. Within 10 weeks, it had implemented three modules of SAP HANA on AWS: SAP FICO (financial accounting and controlling), SAP SD (sales and distribution), and SAP MM (materials management). The company is using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and a variety of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) SAP-certified instances to store and process data on the AWS Cloud.

Grove attributes the speed of implementation to the expertise of Deloitte and AWS, the quality of SAP as a comprehensive ERP system, and the fact that it had no legacy systems that had to be migrated to SAP. This was a greenfield SAP implementation for a startup, and Grove trusted its partners to implement best practices from day one.

Thinh shares, “We spent a lot of time researching and choosing the most suitable partners so that once implementation began, the process was easy. Plus, Deloitte didn’t have to study any legacy systems and processes. This allowed project teams to focus on Grove Group’s future and how to design an IT landscape to support our ambitious growth.”

AWS offered several full-day training courses for Grove’s management and technical team on the basics of AWS Cloud operations. “AWS training sessions provided us with knowledge to manage our SAP system and engage with Deloitte. I’m confident that we’ll be able to handle day-to-day management by ourselves after this one-year implementation phase,” Thinh says.

The AWS account team and solutions architects continue to support Grove’s IT team of five as questions arise. Grove Group employs just one IT team member dedicated to managing its AWS Cloud infrastructure and hosting for SAP. Thinh believes the company would have needed a much larger team to implement and manage SAP S/4HANA on premises.

Grove Group values the real-time visibility that it has gained with SAP on AWS, including multiple operational reports available at any time. Management can plan sales and distribution strategies based on the most updated information and adjust plans if data indicates an unforeseen change in circumstances.

“If there’s a disruption at our distribution centers or offices across Vietnam, we’re alerted immediately because the system works in real time. Plus, we have a strong network connection with AWS and have had no downtime,” says Thinh.

After implementing SAP S/4HANA for its distribution business, Grove Group has turned its attention to implementing SAP for its logistics division with continued support from Deloitte and AWS. The company is also in conversations with AWS to provision cloud architecture for its warehouse and transport management systems in late 2021.

With the rich data being collected during its first year of cloud operations, Grove Group aims to set up a data and analytics pipeline by the following year. Thinh says, “We now have a robust data foundation and look forward to exploring how AWS can further support us in the next stage when we focus on creating a data warehouse.”

To learn more, visit SAP on AWS