Business opportunity
A leading children’s apparel brand processes hundreds of thousands of financial transactions daily in service of customers throughout North America. To keep business running smoothly, the company has relied on SAP S/4HANA for Finance for nearly a decade.
During that time, the company grew steadily, expanded into new markets, acquired other businesses, and developed new partnerships with retailers in other categories. Along the way, the brand’s business systems incurred technical debt, creating a gap that not only put aspirations out of reach but threatened the efficiency and agility of everyday operations. To protect its brand and prepare for planned innovation with its financial workflows, the company needed to modernize its SAP business applications and landscape infrastructure as quickly as possible.
Technical challenge
The company's legacy on-premises infrastructure was overdue for a makeover. Aging systems were inefficient, expensive to maintain, and difficult to manage. The situation on the software side was critical: the company’s existing version of SAP S/4HANA for Finance was rapidly approaching end of support.
Constrained by budget and timeline, the company needed a knowledgeable partner with proven expertise to help efficiently modernize the SAP landscape for maximum potential benefits.
Our solution
Together, the apparel retailer and Kyndryl upgraded SAP S/4HANA for Finance and migrated the landscape to the cloud using RISE with SAP on Amazon Web Services (AWS). By running the upgraded business applications on AWS, the retailer gains elastic infrastructure and scalability along with flexible cost.
Working against a demanding timeline, Kyndryl found ways to “crash the schedule,” as project managers say. The team followed a compressed testing cycle and used the quality assurance systems to serve a dual function: fulfilling standard integration and user acceptance testing requirements while also serving as the sole rehearsal stage for the final production migration.
To accelerate delivery and minimize business disruption, the team performed the SAP version upgrade and migration to RISE with SAP on AWS simultaneously in a single outage window over one long weekend.
The power of partnership
Partnerships with AWS and SAP, by combining expertise, enabled the delivery team to efficiently streamline the retailer’s otherwise complex critical IT modernization and cloud migration. The result was a smooth, on-time transition to the new SAP S/4HANA for Finance environment on AWS.