Nissan in Europe Achieves Faster Processing, Lowers Recovery Time for SAP System Using Amazon EC2

Every Nissan car is made up of thousands of components and built on a complex construction line, which means there is a lot of data to analyze behind the scenes. Over time, Nissan in Europe’s on-premises data center needed to change to manage the large volume of data required to track information, such as financial costs across the life cycle of a new vehicle. To meet its performance needs and anticipate the future, Nissan in Europe decided to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

After migrating its SAP infrastructure to AWS, the company additionally reduced and compressed its database by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Nissan in Europe achieved 63 percent faster processing times and reduced database recovery times significantly using snapshots from Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block storage service designed for Amazon EC2.

Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. (NML) is headquartered in Japan and comprises four regions: Japan and the Association of South East Asian Nations; China; the Americas; and the Africa, Middle East, India, Europe, and Oceania (AMIEO) region, of which Nissan in Europe is part. NML began domestic automobile production in the early 1900s and today is a global producer of automobiles. NML started implementing AWS in July 2018 as part of an ongoing global cloud strategy for its three core regions of Europe, North America, and Japan. The company built a common cloud solution in each of these regions using AWS Landing Zone, a solution that lets customers more quickly set up a secure, multiaccount AWS environment based on AWS best practices, and it has an ongoing initiative to drive additional global services to AWS.

Nissan in Europe’s information systems and IT team supports all the company’s lines of business, such as marketing and finance. The team handles large volumes of data to support these aspects of the company—for example, tracking the financial costs of a new vehicle as it progresses from production to sale. Nissan in Europe’s former on-premises data center managed a large database of around 20 TB but could not meet the company’s future business demands. Additionally, database restoration in the event of a failure was predicted with future business growth to take longer than business expectations. This extended recovery time was one of the core reasons that Nissan in Europe chose to migrate its on-premises SAP system—which was running in part using a different cloud service—to AWS. By migrating to AWS, Nissan in Europe was able to develop a sustainable solution to support operations and achieve its business continuity goals.

Nissan in Europe built its solution on Amazon EC2 so that it would have the necessary flexibility and scalability to meet business requirements. In addition to Amazon EC2, Nissan in Europe uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Nissan in Europe can also give employees simple access to files on their laptops and PCs because Amazon S3 is compatible with AWS Storage Gateway, a set of hybrid cloud services that gives on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage.

In September 2020, Nissan in Europe initiated a 6-month migration project of its SAP solution to AWS with the objective of reducing and compressing the amount of storage needed while optimizing recovery times. Nissan in Europe’s migration was complex and required moving multiple components, including the main SAP enterprise resource planning central component application servers and database, a business intelligence instance supporting the financial breakthrough component, and a business intelligence instance supporting Nissan South Africa. The company migrated 211 interfaces as part of the project. Because of the complexity of the migration and the need to complete the project by the end of the fiscal year, Nissan in Europe turned to Accenture, an AWS Partner, to support the migration project. Accenture’s expertise with SAP migration helped Nissan in Europe go live with the project by the target date.

After migrating the SAP solution from the company’s on-premises data center to AWS, Nissan in Europe significantly reduced its database recovery time to 2 hours, aligning with the requirements of the business. To reduce the recovery time, Nissan in Europe implemented a highly available architecture that replicated data to other active databases, reducing the need to rely on backups in case of system failure. The company also improved the performance of its SAP business process as a result of the migration. “On AWS, we have noticed a significant performance improvement of about 63 percent for the duration of overall processes,” says Richard van der Meer, Nissan AMIEO vice president and chief information officer. “That means employees can perform their jobs faster and focus more on added business value.”

To meet changing performance needs, Nissan in Europe uses the scalability of Amazon EC2 along with Amazon EBS. If the company needs to scale up its nonproduction environment to support new program testing, Nissan in Europe can make that change virtually instantaneously. “For a program that required heavy technical work and testing, we were able to scale the servers up by four times, complete the testing, and scale them back down again,” says van der Meer. “We would not have been able to do that with our on-premises solution within the timescale that we did using AWS.” Additionally, the company can now run complex and performance-intensive financial processes for its material ledger. At the end of the month, employees can run multiple material ledgers at the same time because of the scalability of the cloud, which saves them time. 

The success of this migration marks an important step in the company’s ongoing global cloud strategy. Because of benefits already realized, Nissan in Europe plans to migrate its core after-sales system from on premises to AWS as well. The company also plans to continue deploying cloud-native applications to benefit from the performance and scalability of AWS services and to support Nissan in Europe’s additional business processes and growth.