“This was an incredibly complex project for Reynolds Consumer Products and the Lemongrass team aligned with us very quickly to establish executive leadership around SAP and AWS, and closely integrate with our technical teams to hit very tight deadlines. They had a sound design and project plan, excellent methodology with highly skilled and experienced consultants. With the introductions of the Covid-19 restrictions, Lemongrass pivoted quickly to support a new approach at cutover, four weeks prior to Go Live, and we didn’t miss a beat. Went live on time and under budget.”
Eric W. Odell, Executive Director of Infrastructure Services, Reynolds
Transformed and Modernized a Complex SAP Estate with AWS
In January 2020, Reynolds Consumer Products became a publicly-traded company on the Nasdaq. At the time, Reynolds Consumer Products and Pactiv shared the same SAP environments. After the IPO, the decision was made to separate the companies into independent systems with Reynolds opting for a cloud-based solution and Pactiv remaining in the on-premise environment.
A carve-out is one of the most complex tasks for a company. Not only do organizational and procedural changes need to be managed but separating the systems can be challenging. In addition to divesting Reynolds’ systems into a new agile cloud landscape, the company’s objective was to:
- Transform and modernize the SAP estate onto cost-optimized DB platforms, resolving non-Unicode systems
- Access immediate Cloud benefits such as the ability to rightsize and grow on-demand and schedule system updates
- Enhance their speed to innovation, i.e., accessibility to DevOps systems on demand, to further reduce the system landscape size and increase the ability to run multiple activities without the traditional Basis and infrastructure cost penalties
- Deliver near-zero downtime migration acceleration to minimize business risk impact
Reynolds Consumer Products selected AWS for its reliable and secure global infrastructure and its rapid innovation cycles that outpace other hyperscalers and provide measurable scalability, agility, and integration gains. Lemongrass was chosen due to its reputation in the industry and its singular focus on the complex task of running SAP on AWS. Also a factor was Lemongrass’s Cloud Management Platform, a sophisticated set of purpose-built tools that facilitate moving SAP to the AWS Cloud including a full suite of automation tools specifically for migrations.
The Lemongrass team worked with three separate organizations, Rank, Pactiv, and Reynolds Consumer Products, to deliver this solution. This necessitated project management and communication with three separate and distinct management teams, all with varying expectations and timeframes which resulted in a delayed start.
The project was a success and the teams delivered on time absorbing the 3-week delay at the onset and delivering the project work in just 7 weeks. In addition, all four QA system builds were delivered with zero impact to the functional team’s schedule.
The results of the projects included:
- A successful systems separation of SAP ECC, LES, BOBJ, BW, Portal, PI, SLT, HANA tenant, Fiori into a new SAP on AWS automated environment. This included Unicode and HANA migration for both ECC and LES due, in part, to extensive use of automation provided by the Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP).
- As Lemongrass is a “Born in the Cloud” organization, built to operate across diverse locations leveraging automated procedures, the whole migration was successfully executed remotely, despite the impact of COVID-19.
- The Lemongrass Cloud Migrate automation technology enables the migration of extremely large SAP DB’s while they are still active, minimizing the downtime phase to that of a typical small SAP system. This model enabled a 10TB Oracle on-premise source DB to be converted and migrated to a 3TB HANA instance comfortably within a small weekend cutover period.
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