One Step Closer

17 Jan 2022

A Journey to S/4HANA

THE BACKGROUND

Briscoes Homeware has been operating in New Zealand for more than 150 years; it is an iconic brand for quality branded homeware. Briscoes Homeware is part of the overall Briscoe Group Limited, which includes Briscoes Homeware, Living & Giving and Rebel Sport and employs approximately 2,100 people over 85 stores throughout the country.

With sales of over $700 Million, you can understand why their SAP environment is a critical part of their business management landscape.

THE CHALLENGE

Briscoes have been long term proponents of SAP, and as we have talked about it is an integral part of running their business. To ensure Briscoes were in line with the strategic direction of SAP since their announcement of S/4HANA, and considering new features and performance benefits, there was always a plan to migrate when the time was right. Couple this with their aging server hardware Briscoes saw an opportunity to migrate, the question was how?

1. Should they choose On Premise, Private Cloud or Public Cloud?
2. Should they do a System Conversion or a new Implementation?
3. Should the System Conversion be done in one step or two steps?

Briscoes needed to call in the experts.

THE SOLUTION

Realtech has been the SAP Architecture Partner of choice for Briscoes for over 14 years, and as with all our clients, we take a long term approach to helping our client’s businesses succeed. Realtech provided Briscoes the support they needed to assess the myriad of architectural considerations and migration approaches. Being risk averse Briscoes agreed to a two-step conversion approach.

• Step 1: Migrate to HANA on new on-premise hardware (Suite on HANA).
• Step 2: Convert ERP 6.0 to S/4HANA (in the future).

Realtech believes there was significant business value in the Suite on HANA approach as a step toward S/4HANA. One of the essential elements to think about is the fact Briscoes is a retail business with a massive data set and limited ability for downtime.

The best way to be able to complete the migration to SAP Business Suite on HANA was to move SAP ECC to new hardware, so the performance was there with minimal downtime, thereby creating an environment for a seamless in-place conversion to S/4HANA. Moving to SAP Suite on HANA first, means that the power and performance of HANA is available for the conversion to S/4HANA within a downtime window that is acceptable to the business.

THE OUTCOME

Post the migration to SAP Business Suite on HANA Briscoes sees significant performance improvements in comparison, including:

• 80% decrease in the size of the database.
• 25% reduction in backup times.
• 75% increase in the speed of database restores.
• There has been a significant improvement in the response time for the users.
• Reports are running at least 3 times faster than before.

Realtech is confident in asserting the migration to SAP Business Suite on HANA, followed by an in-place conversion to S/4HANA as the right approach for Briscoes; this approach provides Briscoes with the full platform to utilise and adopt the benefits across all areas of the business.

Customer Stories