Simon, an electrical and lighting international manufacturing business, is based primarily in Spain but has presence in 90 countries worldwide with over 4,000 people working in 15 locations and 9 production facilities. 

Linke, as one of their cloud technology consultant partner, we have been able to successfully help them on their digital transformation journey by helping them to migrate their SAP production, development and quality systems to Amazon Web Services cloud. 

In the following blogpost we want to highlight the key aspects and results from this project. 

The path to a powerful infrastructure

Simon has been implementing and investing on digital transformation over 10 years now. Thanks to their innovative vision, they were able to become pioneers within the electrical sector through Internet of Things (IoT) and this, in turn, lead to a specialized product released during the company's centenary.

When Simon had to undergo a digital transformation, the IT department realized that the technological infrastructure had to be renewed. At the same time, the management systems would have to be brought up to modern standards and performance would have to improve while maintenance and management costs needed to be reduced. Additionally, the IT department needs to continually support corporate innovation initiatives so that it still possible to respond rapidly to any market changes.

Cloud Migration Mission

Previously, Simon managed its operations via their SAP ERP software held on-premise. But before the company could adopt SAP systems on AWS S/4HANA, it had to perform an analysis of the cost-benefit ratio and prepare for the migration. The best solution? A public cloud environment was the chosen option.

Simon opted for SAP systems on AWS public cloud, not only because of the ease that AWS brings when hosting, maintaining and managing SAP's ERP but also because of the flexibility of extending another layer of services around the platform. 

AWS and Linke were chosen to carry out this project. As a trusted AWS Advance Partner, our experts at Linke proposed a 5 step methodology in order to migrate the production, development and quality environments of the ERP, SAP ECC 6.08 plus, they migrate the Content Server and installed the SAP Solution Manager 7.2. 

The 5 Steps of an integrated SAP Migration

The SAP migration to Amazon Web Services was carried out across the following phases:
1. Moving from SAP ERP to Sandbox environment
2. Migration of the development environment.
3. Migration of the quality environment.
4. Moving both the production environment and the Content Server within a simulated environment so that the timing of the migration could be re-evaluated after the completion of the set-up tasks in the ERP.
5. The definitive migration.

David Xicota, Simon's IT director, stated that Linke's methodology made the migration much easier and came with a high guarantee of success allowing Simon to minimize their risks and meet deadlines. Linke also helped with Simon's AWS environments, outside SAP, with the organization's various tasks such as ticketing, naming and access policy levels.

As a result, Simon has now achieved the benefits of using a flexible architecture and increased productivity of all the company systems (multiplied by 4 in all areas and, in some transactions, by 17). For Simon, the future means agility, security and scalability, benefits that only cloud computing can provide. 

Want to learn more about how to optimize your AWS cloud infrastructure? Contact us, we'll be happy to advise you.

Click below if you want to know more about Simon´s success story.