Hyundai Partners with AWS to Scale Retail and Power Vehicle AI

As Hyundai Motor Group expanded globally, critical challenges emerged. “We rolled out our ERP system using a traditional method. Over time, this led to more than 30 separate SAP ERP systems around the world, creating big challenges for our future,” said Sunwoo Kim, VP and Head of Solution Division at Hyundai-AutoEver. Challenges included:

1. System fragmentation and operational complexity: Multiple independently built ERP systems across countries running on different versions and platforms led to inconsistencies across headquarters and subsidiaries, creating barriers to harmonizing global processes and responding to market changes and new business models like mobility-as-a-service. The fragmentation led to operational cost inefficiencies.
2. Legacy technology constraints: Hyundai's SAP ECC system, scheduled for end-of-service in 2027, couldn't support evolving requirements including AI-driven innovation. Hyundai faced sharply rising infrastructure and license costs inherent to its legacy on-premises environment and its document management system was costly and cumbersome.
3. Business continuity risks: Existing system architecture lacked comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities at global scale—critical for worldwide manufacturing and sales operations.
4. Regional process variations: Sales operations varied significantly across countries due to local regulations and dealer relationships, requiring custom system builds that increased complexity and maintenance overhead costs.

“Our current architecture could not ensure disaster recovery at scale, and fragmented systems increased outage risks,” said Kim.

Planning for the future, Hyundai Motor Group focused on process standardization, master data integration, and building a global operations model while accommodating local requirements. With an integrated master data system, all entities would use standard code, making data collection and analysis much faster and more accurate.

The company chose a five-region approach (Korea, America, Europe, APEC, and China) rather than a single global instance to mitigate failure risk and comply with regional data privacy requirements.

Hyundai evaluated cloud providers based on SAP support, global region availability, high availability architecture with cross-continental disaster recovery, and SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) service availability. “We had over 100 legacy systems running on AWS, and our team has had a great experience with the Migration Support Service for SAP RISE (MSSR), powered by AWS Countdown Premium. AWS guarantees fast response and works closely with SAP Enterprise Cloud Services if any RISE-related issues occur,” said Kim. When severe latency issues threatened the timeline, the MSSR team identified root causes, built the evidence case for infrastructure replacement, and coordinated resource re-provisioning with Hyundai-AutoEver. Throughout the critical 5-day cutover period, the MSSR team provided 24/7 monitoring across all infrastructure layers.

Hyundai unified its disparate ERP systems into one environment on AWS for RISE with SAP for global scalability to support global expansion, security, compliance, and resilience. The company added its own architectural innovation for zonal high availability and cross-continental disaster recovery to keep its ERP running even during a regional outage. “In each region, we use multiple availability zones with synchronized active and standby databases within 50 kilometers. We added disaster recovery across continents using synchronous replication, so even in extreme situations—natural disasters, political issues—we can keep business running," explained Kim. For example, Korea headquarters runs in Seoul with standby in Seoul, and their disaster recovery in a US Region.

“Our journey with SAP RISE on AWS has truly gone beyond a typical ERP implementation. We require the best architecture for a complex network environment,” said Kim. “AWS works closely with SAP for fast response and root cause analysis, and they support proper sizing, deliver instances on time, and improved network performance for our critical business processes.”  

To address costly long-term document retention requirements, Hyundai built a cloud-based document management solution using Amazon S3 that integrates with SAP and non-SAP systems, providing secure encrypted storage, easy version control, and improved search speed.

ERP systems handle mass transaction data and connect countless interfaces across the organization. Traditional monitoring often fails to detect issues early, making it hard to avoid business risk. Hyundai developed an integrated ERP real-time monitoring solution using Amazon Quick for predictive inference to identify risks before they impact its operation. Amazon Quick combines agentic teammates for research, business intelligence, and automation into a unified digital workspace for day-to-day work. The service uses a Quick Index to create a secure, searchable repository that consolidates documents, files, and application data to power AI-driven insights and responses.

Hyundai consolidated approximately 30 disparate on-premises ERP instances into 11 instances across five global regions on AWS for RISE on SAP, enabling:

Operational and capex cost reduction— >30% through regional instance strategy and cloud migration

Document storage— 85% cost reduction for 10-year retention

Document search speed—>2x improvement

Global scale and resilience—AWS Global Infrastructure supporting Zonal HA and cross-continental disaster recovery

“For documents that need to be stored for 10 years, we cut costs by 85%. And by moving from a traditional directory structure to a key-value approach, search speed improved by more than 2x.”

Sunwoo Kim, VP and Head of Solution Division at Hyundai AutoEver

"We’re reimagining the automotive business with Amazon in three ways. First, expanded reach through vehicle sales on Amazon.com, creating an entirely new customer channel and revenue stream. Second, enhanced experience by embedding Alexa into new vehicles for a smarter, more connected driving experience. Third, transforming our ERP system with SAP RISE on AWS improves agility, efficiency, and resilience, and gives us a foundation for the future,” concluded Kim.