Jeju Beer Case Study

Founded in 2015, Jeju Beer is a craft beer manufacturer located on Korea’s Jeju Island. In partnership and knowledge transfers with the Brooklyn Brewery, one of the leading craft beer brands in the United States, it introduced various beers such as ‘Jeju Wheat Ale’ and ‘Jeju Pellong Ale’. As the first craft beer company to enter Korea’s five major convenience stores and large supermarket chains, its sales have doubled every year. In recognition of continuous sales and market share growth, Jeju Beer has attracted additional investment of 14 billion won from six investment companies including Stonebridge Ventures, achieving a cumulative investment of 60 billion won. Jeju Beer plans to double its production by expanding existing breweries to the largest production volumes in the industry. In addition, the company is planning for an IPO in 2021.

After its launch, Jeju Beer was recognized for its marketability and growth potential based on its continuous growth. In July 2020, it became the first company in the craft beer industry to be selected as the “Pre-Unicorn” by Korea’s Ministry of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and Startups. It registered significant sales growth and is stocked by five major convenience stores and large supermarket chains in Korea. The company needed a proven solution that could respond quickly, optimize resources, and help it expand globally for its fast growing business. “It was difficult to support the business with the existing ERP system since there were no internal personnel to solve the ERP system’s security and maintenance issues. We needed to source a new reliable solution to manage everything,” said Daehee Ko, Team Leader in charge of the SAP project at Jeju Beer’s accounting team.

Jeju Beer decided to move to SAP on AWS to enhance its business competitiveness and address production efficiency, supply chain and various other management requirements in line with the company’s strategic plans and business growth. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen for its performance, scalability, global infrastructure, SAP certification services, and its customer-obsessed approach.

With support from AWS Partner Network (APN) partner Megazone Cloud, the company was able to build, deploy, and stabilize its SAP solutions on AWS in just two months. Jeju Beer now runs highly secure and universally used AWS services for SAP solution performance and stability. AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R4 memory optimized instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) were provisioned to meet its SAP requirements to deliver consider the optimal SAP user experience. In addition, Jeju Beer strengthened security by setting the permissions required to access each account differently, and set up an AWS VPC Security Group for authorized IP users.

Shin-woo Kim, Team Leader of SAP on Cloud at Megazone Cloud, said, “At the time, Jeju Beer had to quickly operate SAP by moving to a new infrastructure, and Megazone built SAP on schedule and supported them to operate it stably. We also provide 24-hour monitoring and control services to notify the manager and relevant departments in the event of a failure, so that they can recover as soon as possible. We provide a system that helps our customers focus on their core business.”

Jeju Beer successfully built and operated SAP within a short span with active support from AWS. Ko said, “The AWS account team shared a variety of customer references similar to what we are experiencing, so we could consider issues when introducing SAP and reduce the need for unnecessary work. We were able to build SAP in just two months, sharing and coordinating our needs through preliminary meetings.”

In the past, Jeju Beer had a high probability of human error due to the handwritten work process for data entry. By running SAP on AWS, it now has an environment that reduces the margins for human errors. As a result, the data hygiene produced through SAP has improved and is widely trusted. It has also protected data by only letting authorized personnel view sensitive data, through a data security and access classification. Ko said, “We used to be busy handling work, but now we can take time to do verification or self-development after business processing, which not only increases work efficiency but also work satisfaction.”

There are many issues to consider when operating infrastructure and IT equipment, such as the purchase of equipment, adding additional operational personnel, aging equipment and equipment replacement. But it is a different scenario with AWS and its proven APN partners managing everything from preparation to operation. “Thanks to AWS, we are able to focus on our core business, and we believe that AWS and Megazone will help us solve problems quickly and efficiently. We feel that the AWS service is outstanding in terms of performance, availability and scalability,” said Ko.

Jeju Beer is currently running SAP in Seoul and the Jeju region, and is preparing for global expansion by using AWS’s global infrastructure.