Entry Title: Customer Name: HANA Innovation Award Track Customer or Partner: SAP HANA Innovation Award 2017 Pitch Deck Turbocharging core business processes instantly in the cloud Zappos.com Customer HANA Innovation Award Category (Digital Trailblazer, Social Hero, : Name, Title, and Company Name (Submitter):, SAP Partner Marketing, megajo@amazon.com
COMPANY BACKGROUND Zappos.com was established in 1999 to offer the best possible online shopping experience for footwear. Over the years, the selection has grown to include not only footwear but clothing, accessories, housewares, and more. In 2009 Zappos was acquired by Amazon.com. At that time the company s revenue was around $1 billion. In September 2013, Zappos moved their headquarters from Henderson, Nevada to the former Las Vegas City Hall building in downtown Las Vegas. They have approximately 1500 employees and have been recognized as one of FORTUNE s 100 Best Companies to Work For 6 years in a row since 2009.
SOLUTION DESCRIPTION Zappos moves at the speed of the internet, not only to provide the best possible service and selection to its customers but also in the way it runs its operations. SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) is the backbone of Zappos s back office. Its ability to promptly process business transactions and support business analysis in real-time is critical to Zappos s effective business operations. To accelerate the pace of business transactions and analysis, Zappos has partnered with (AWS) and SAP. Together they have co-innovated and tested a migration methodology that allows for the fast migration of SAP ECC from an on-premises instance running Oracle Database to a Memory Optimized AWS X1 instance running SAP ECC on HANA. The results are breathtaking. Not only was the migration completed within less than 48 hours but also the overall system performance has dramatically improved - in some instances up to 240 fold. Based on the positive results of this proof of concept, Zappos is now considering migrating more of its SAP-based software assets to SAP HANA and the AWS Cloud.
STAKEHOLDER QUOTE Zappos is extremely excited to move onto SAP Suite on HANA hosted by AWS and significantly improve speed and performance! Scott Schaefer, Senior Director of Finance We are so excited to see how the speed and processing power of HANA on AWS will improve productivity! Saul Dave, Director of Enterprise Systems
BUSINESS CHALLENGES With the goal of enabling informed decision making across its organization, in 2015, Zappos migrated its SAP Business Warehouse and SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation implementation to SAP HANA. The positive results of that project convinced Zappos to include a migration of its SAP landscape to SAP HANA as a cornerstone of its five-year IT modernization plan. The next challenge for Zappos was then ensuring that its core business process could become smarter and more agile. With SAP ECC running on the Oracle database, business reporting was challenging at best. It was not uncommon to see queries timeout when performing drill downs on general ledger accounts and cost centers. Both Zappos s end users and IT personnel were frustrated with the slow performance and constant database tuning required to keep pace with the demands of Zappos s business.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES Zappos needed an agile and economically-sound way to improve system performance in some of its core business processes both during the experimentation phase and eventually in the production phase. At the same time, the company did not want to allocate a large upfront budget or a substantial number of technical human resources to the project, as this would have negatively affected ongoing business operations. The time required for the migration was also a big concern for Zappos. A cloud-based proof-of-concept developed in collaboration with AWS and SAP provided the right approach, reducing the business risk with low upfront capital expenditure, access to best-in-class professional managed infrastructure, and the opportunity to experiment with modern real-time data management technology. And all while relying on the same proven SAP applications for its core business processes. The single biggest benefit of this approach was the rapid validation of Zappos s strategic business decision to migrate SAP ECC on Oracle to SAP Business Suite on HANA, while ensuring business process continuity and maintaining existing technical investments through a full-scale production migration.
WHAT HAPPENED / WHAT WAS THE IMPACT? 1. The SAP ECC migration to SAP HANA on AWS was a success, and completed in less than 48 hours. 2. Things that were giving us headaches before, now complete instantly, is becoming a common sentence at Zappos. 3. But these are not just words; here is and excerpt of the hard data that supports that sentence:
HUMAN EMPOWERMENT End users can now be reassured that their queries will return results promptly, no matter their complexity and the number of user concurrently accessing the system. With performance improvement across critical business processes - ranging from 3 to 240 times faster - and no timeout queries, employs becomes more productive, and are able to accomplish more. By relying on modern technology, IT personnel become a change agent for the business, contributing to the increased business agility and serving business needs promptly migration within 24 hours, instant system provisioning, and real-time data management with no performance tuning.
BUSINESS AND SOCIAL VALUE With new speed and reliability across core business processes, business agility grows and Zappos can reach new levels of efficiencies, lowering operational costs, which allow Zappos to be more responsive to changes in customer demand. With on-demand access to a scalable technology infrastructure to support its business processes, Zappos can address changes in market conditions and capitalize on new business opportunities promptly and with less risk. With the ability to avoid high upfront capital expenditures and choose a pay-as-you-go model for new technology needs, Zappos can innovate freely while lowering business risks.
TECHNICAL IMPACT With no upfront capital expenditure and a very small human capital investment, Zappos has been able to prove that its IT modernization plan is sound cloud-based technology and real-time in-memory data management provide the right backbone for Zappos s operational excellence. New efficiencies can be achieved by relying on an economically-sound, world-class, scalable, cloud technology infrastructure that can be instantly provisioned no need for long procurement cycles and laborious system installations. IT modernization can proceed full speed ahead without disrupting business operation, as user are still relying on the same applications to get their job done, transparently taking advantage of the increased system performance Reliance on a now proven mythology and migration tools provides assurance that further migrations can be accomplished within time and budget, lowering business risks migrating a 2TB + database in less than 48 hours proves the technical feasibility of the plan and the reliability of both the tools and the methodology used.
SAP SOLUTIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES USED SAP ERP Central Component SAP Business Warehouse SAP HANA SAP Solution Manager SAP Business Objects BI SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation SAP NetWeaver Portal SAP Process Integration SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise SAP Software Update Manager Database Migration Option + AWS Quick Starts for SAP HANA
ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM Zappos SAP Architecture SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), SAP Business Objects Planning and Consolidation (BI BPC), and SAP Solution Manager run on SAP HANA 1.0 Rev 122.06 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) SAP Portal, SAP Process Integration, and SAP Business Objects BI run on SAP Adaptive Server Entropies 16.0 (ASE) on RHEL
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