Vivere Begins Cloud Journey with SAP Migration to AWS

For businesses and individuals seeking a one-stop solution to their interior and furnishing needs, Indonesia’s Vivere Group is ready to serve. With retail showrooms as well as custom solutions for offices and B2B clients, Vivere is a leading interior contractor and furniture manufacturer. The company also offers its products and services overseas.

Established in 1984, the group has been running SAP software since 2012. Until 2019, it was using on-premises hardware to run both mission-critical and non-production workloads. Vivere uses SAP Business All-in-One ERP software, including SAP Production Planning for manufacturing alignment, and three additional SAP modules to support its operations. It also uses SAP Business Warehouse for analytics. Vivere's retail point of sale (POS) application is integrated with SAP, and teams throughout the organization, from line-level associates to executive directors, use SAP daily.

In early 2019, Donny Fernando, head of IT at Vivere, began advocating migration to the cloud for improved agility. The company’s infrastructure was becoming obsolete and many servers were nearing capacity. Extremely slow response times and repeated episodes of downtime—totaling nearly 6 hours each month—affected employees’ ability to do their jobs.

Management regularly decides on a new project or partner to expand the business, and Donny’s team was often left scrambling to provision supporting resources. Last year, for example, Vivere launched a new retail custom furniture line, branded IDEMU, with a partner in China. It had just two months from project inception until the launch, a timeline that would have been challenging, if not impossible, using an on-premises infrastructure.

Vivere approached Amazon Web Services (AWS) to kick-start its migration to the cloud. Management chose to run SAP on AWS to take advantage of the many security standards and compliance certifications and for the strength of the AWS Partner Network (APN) in Indonesia. The group began working with PT Central Data Technology, an APN Consulting Partner, to plan Vivere’s migration in April 2019.

“PT Central Data Technology has been a strategic partner in our transition to the AWS Cloud,” Donny says. “The Central Data Technology team and AWS team provided—and continue to provide—full support and prompt assistance for our SAP migration.” He also performed an analysis on the total cost of ownership that clearly demonstrated the financial benefit of cloud migration to management. “In terms of cost savings from running our SAP environment on the AWS Cloud, we expect our infrastructure costs to decrease by 25 percent year-on-year over the next five years.”

Planning was essential to Vivere’s successful migration. Teams took more than two months to perform functional tests in an AWS sandbox environment to verify that SAP would run smoothly and integrate with partner and vendor systems. Vivere decided to deploy AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN), which provides it with a highly secure network connection.

Donny also made sure that all the teams had the same vision for a cloud-based future. This two-pronged planning and onboarding approach helped ensure zero downtime during migration. Based on the success of the SAP migration, which was completed in August 2019, Vivere migrated all remaining workloads to the AWS Cloud. With the help of Central Data Technology, most workloads, including Vivere’s POS system and databases, were running on AWS by December 2019.

For Vivere, the most crucial system requirement is the ability to quickly extend resources to accommodate new projects such as its new IDEMU brand. Donny cites a recent example when Vivere hit maximum capacity for a finance database and was able to scale up to a new instance type in two hours. Such capacity extension would have taken weeks or months in its on-premises environment, not to mention the frustration it would have caused the IT team.

The IT team and SAP users across the organization appreciate the improved system performance. “SAP Business All-in-One ERP is now about 40 percent faster on the AWS Cloud compared to our previous on-premises environment,” Donny says. Application availability has also improved. Before, Vivere was experiencing availability levels averaging below 99.5 percent, but on AWS, application availability has increased to 99.8 percent.

Vivere used CloudEndure Migration to expedite its migration process and took advantage of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to set up its Oracle and PostgreSQL database engines in the AWS Cloud. For its storage needs, Vivere uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which supports heavy analytics workloads in SAP Business Warehouse. The company relies on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots to back up data in Amazon S3 and ensure business continuity with geographic data replication.

“Previously, we needed five hours to back up our system on premises, but in the AWS Cloud, backups run automatically. Having the backup within AWS rather than as a separate solution has really improved our productivity,” Donny says. Productivity gains have also been achieved because of the elimination of server maintenance. “The IT team has decreased its operation workload without having to constantly check on hardware. Its bandwidth is now distributed to innovation on the cloud such as the implementation of robotic process automation.”

Shortly after its SAP migration, Vivere’s engineers started using RPA on the AWS Cloud to automate desktop data entry for the group’s finance and accounting teams. They are now using unattended robots on the UiPath platform. Formerly, engineers couldn’t implement such robots because they require an orchestrator with services that run only on Windows or Microsoft SQL servers, and Vivere had neither the hardware nor licenses to run such servers. “If we had used an on-premises solution, we would have needed at least four weeks to provision hardware and licenses. By running our RPA system on AWS to improve process efficiency, we only needed four hours to set up unattended RPA services,” Donny explains.

As Vivere enters the next phase of its cloud journey, Donny is working to enrich his team members’ skills through online training, so they are more agile when developing new cloud-based applications. “We want to take advantage of the breadth of services AWS offers like machine learning, analytics, and IoT,” he says. “By using the AWS Cloud, we are now able to run our SAP solutions seamlessly on a highly secure, all-in, SAP-certified cloud infrastructure.”

To learn more, visit AWS for SAP Solutions.