Bakers Delight
5 Aug 2022
An SAP migration to Microsoft Azure success story
THE BACKGROUND
Griffins have been delighting Kiwis' taste buds for over 150 years. Whether it is a seriously dunkable Gingernut or a genuinely indulgent ToffeePop, everyone has a favourite Griffin's bikkie. It has been a pretty delicious journey.
As one of New Zealand's largest snack food manufacturers, they have a range of consumer brands across multiple retail categories which include Griffin's, Huntley & Palmers, Eta and Nice & Natural. From their two manufacturing sites in Auckland, they not only manufacture biscuits, chips, bars and crackers for their brands, but they co-manufacture products for other companies.
SAP is critical in the operations of the business and has been for over 20 years. The priority for the IT team has always been to ensure the performance and the reliability of the system.
THE CHALLENGE
With this initiative in mind, and with some ageing infrastructure, latency issues in the current Like many businesses, Griffins were looking at ways to drive their business forward, and we're looking into the adoption of a "cloud-first" strategy as a means to achieving it. The business driver for such a change was three-fold:
- The age of the current hardware meant there was a need to update
- With a single point of failure in the current system, there was a need for geographical redundancy and disaster recovery capability, and
- The need to allow for scale to meet the future needs of the business.
It was clear that the potential of "Cloud", needed to be explored and for Griffins, this was the perfect opportunity to do so.
THE SOLUTION
Realtech is the vital SAP technology provider for Griffins, so with the needs of the business and the capability of the cloud in mind, discussions started on how to turn this vision into a reality.
With our in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft Azure platform, it was the logical choice to meet the needs of Griffins, so with the support of our technology partner Umbrellar clear plans and configurations were put in place for Azure to be the future growth platform for Griffins.
Stephen Lewis General Manager IT commented “Once the environment was set up and configured, the Griffins team managed the overall migration and testing, but we left the bulk of the heavy lifting and SAP specific tasks in the project to Realtech and Umbrellar”.
THE OUTCOME
From its inception, this project was never about cost-saving however, as an outcome the project did save considerable upfront capital cost. It also enabled an effective Disaster Recovery option that would typically have been cost-prohibitive to undertake in our old environment.
Like any migration, unforeseen challenges were experienced such as the volatile nature of disk usage however, these were identified early and worked through proactively to manage the build within Griffins budget.
Now with the new Azure platform Griffins continue to grow the platform to enable business growth and is investigating other areas to leverage opportunities from the platform.