Leading Brazilian Food Company–Microsoft SAP on Azure

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Leading Brazilian Food Company Introduction

The context

NEORIS worked with a Leading Brazilian Food Company with a presence of more than six decades. The Company is currently the largest meat processing company in Latin America and operates in more than 150 countries, with more than $150 billion in sales.

The Company’s products include several of the world’s most renowned brands, along with many specific to the Mexican market.

The challenge

Given their expansion, The Company needed a Cloud based integral solution to cover their consumer products operation needs and decided to implement their applications with SAP S/4HANA (The organization’s standard

They considered two alternatives:

  • SAP Private Cloud (HEC), Software as a Service
  • Public Cloud in Microsoft Azure, with Infrastructure as a Service approach

The Company decided to implement the SAP S4H application solution, in the public AzureCloud , mainly based on:

  • Corporate strategy to start operations in the AzureCloud.
  • Flexible architecture strategy in the Cloud.
  • IaaS strategy trend.
  • To be the first company in the group to perform its operations in the Cloud.

Our solution

NEORIS recommended an Azure-based solution considering:

  • Implementation Scope Mexico
  • Key Technology involved Express Route and VPN Gateway (between The Company and MS Azure Zone SouthCentral USA), Azure Backup, VMs Certified for SAP.
  • SAP certified infrastructure as an Azure service to run HANA applications and databases.
  • Microsoft and SAP have certified how to deploy SAP VMs to support with and without HA environments using Linux operating systems specific to HANA servers and Windows Servers or Linux options for applications.
  • Microsoft and SAP have developed prescriptive detailed architectures to deploy workloads in SAP using Azure IaaS that includes with and without High Availability environments and DRP environments.
  • NEORIS has the experience, certifications, and strategic alliances to enable these SAP architectures in Azure.
  • Azure is SAP certified to run critical SAP applications. Azure is the most efficient and adaptable SAP Cloud infrastructure in the industry, offering SAP HANA certified virtual machines from 192GB to 12TB, in more regions than any other public Cloud provider.

Two SAP components were enabled, in a migration project that lasted 26 weeks:

S/4 HANA
  • Landscape with 3 environments (DEV - QA - PROD)
  • Horizontal scalability when adding new application servers.
  • Vertical scalability by increasing hardware resources.
  • Versions:
    • SAP S/4 HANA 1809 SP01
    • SAP NW ABAP 752 (SAP Application Server and HANA DB installed on different machines)
    • Operating System for HANA DB: SUSE SLES 12
    • Operating System for S/4 Application: Windows Server 2019
FIORI
  • Landscape with 3 environments (DES - QA - PROD).
  • Horizontal scalability when adding new application servers.
  • Vertical scalability by increasing hardware resources.
  • Versions:
    • Fiori Frontend Server 5.0 (SAP Application Server and BD installed in the same box)
    • Operating System: Windows Server 2019
    • Database: SYBASE (SAP Note: 2667191 - SAP Fiori FOR SAP S/4HANA 1809: Release Information Note)

Main benefits

To further clarify the benefits, we are including some real-life quotes made by The Company’s employees in the countries which implemented the solution:

“System performance is very good, the users, being best practices, are aligned to the process and this helps us to maintain options for process improvement,”

Javier Reyes, IT Manager

"The Fiori transactions view is much better than traditional SAP. Its reports, despite being standard, allow us to see what we need for analysis,”

Javier Reyes, IT Manager

"The Cloud solution is very good and allows us to continue growing at the same rate as the business requires and this allows us to be ready at any time to grow,"

Javier Reyes, IT Manager
  • Savings by only paying for what is used.
  • Solutions for all applications through proven combinations of Cloud products and services.
  • Solve specific current challenges and prepare for the future by innovating with Azure solutions.
  • Agile and secure integration with the Corporate Data Center.
  • Privacy and data security at the necessary levels.
  • Capacity growth in accordance with operations growth