NH Foods Chooses SAP on AWS to Engineer a Group-Wide Digital Platform to Transform Business

The NH Foods Group, a food conglomerate with over 80 years of history, aspires to create a sustainable society while unleashing new potentials in protein. As part of this mission, the company leverages its strengths to tackle high-priority issues such as stable procurement and supply of protein; food diversity and health; a sustainable planet; social co-creation and prosperity through food and sports; and employee development and diversity. 

Having identified rapid decision-making, change response, greater productivity through better efficiency, and digital transformation (DX) as essential for long-term growth, the group launched the “Connect Project” to re-engineer and integrate its core systems using SAP ERP.

“Our legacy systems were individually optimized per business or domain,” explains Yoshihiro Nakamura, deputy general manager, Corporate Planning Division, IT Strategy Department. “However, to resolve upcoming issues and achieve our goals, overall optimization was essential for medium- to long-term growth. So we upgraded to standardized, group-wide IT systems for tighter security governance and greater value from employees.” 

The company set a goal of establishing fully integrated and standardized systems to drive faster understanding and decision making; higher productivity through group-wide streamlining, greater flexibility for faster responses, and DX with the freshest technology.

NH Foods had been using AWS for some of its systems since 2017. “AWS’ superiority in quality, cost, and delivery over traditional on-premises environments was obvious,” says Nakamura. “In moving to the cloud, we wanted to evade vendor dependence by in-sourcing IT work through our IT department: AWS was the leader in results and knowledge. Our previous cloud in-sourcing experience meant we were able to maximize cloud benefits in the Connect Project.” The company partnered with Accenture for extensive expertise in SAP and the cloud and ran core systems on SAP on AWS. 

NH Foods' IT Strategy Department demanded a connective and scalable system designed for complete optimization. To provide a platform for such a system, the company selected AWS when upgrading to SAP S/4HANA after using SAP ERP 6.0 on externally housed infrastructure. With the possibility of taking on new challenges, group expansion, and data integration, Nippon Ham decided to migrate to SAP S/4HANA before support for 6.0 ended. The company migrated its accounting system to SAP on AWS first, followed by core systems of the Processing and Meat Business divisions.

In addition to data integration, the company also established business continuity safeguards. A redundant configuration with the production environment and DR environment in two separate area zones guards against failures and disasters. “AWS services allow us to quickly recover from physical failures,” says Nakamura. “We decided to use AWS’ new Osaka region for backup and large-scale disaster measures. On top of the great benefits of running SAP systems, we truly appreciate the excellent reliability and wealth of knowledge. When using AWS for the first time, you encounter several challenges. Knowing that we couldn’t hand everything off to AWS, we took the time to learn AWS’ shared responsibility model and implemented SAP on AWS without any difficulties.”

Takuma Oyama, leader of IT Strategy Department, explains the difference between AWS and on-premises environments: “We knew about the swiftness of fault recovery from our history of using AWS. In on-premises environments, we spent half a day gathering components before starting recovery work. AWS is overwhelmingly faster. Our users found AWS much more intuitive. And AWS Enterprise Support provides support through Technical Account Managers, so we anticipate even greater stability.”

“Previously, equipment failures would force us to stop accounting work,” says Yoshihide Ichihara, manager of IT Strategy Department, who led development of the accounting system during the Connect Project. “AWS offers immediate recovery which eliminates these types of problems.”

As some SAP modules used by NH Foods are quite rare in Japan, the company was worried about a lack of local expertise. However, experienced international personnel from Accenture provided support. “We wouldn’t have been able to successfully implement our SAP modules without Accenture’s local and international professionals” says Nakamura.