Altunbilekler moves to SAP and the Cloud
to support rapid business growth
Altunbilekler uses SAP for key business functions such as Retail, Financial Reporting, Supply Chain Management, POS Data Management and Human Resources. Due to rapid business growth, its internal infrastructure was struggling with performance and availability. The company made the decision to move to the AWS public cloud platform. Full continuity of business cycles, daily operations and reporting chains were critical during migration.
About Altunbilekler
Altunbilekler, an Ankara based grocery retailer chain, was established in 1994. After starting as a single shop supermarket and developing into a huge multi locational service network, innovation became the most important factor for Altunbilekler to enhance the development of services. In line with the idea of supplying affordable and trustworthy quality products,
Altunbilkler has invested in its own meat processing (packing) and bakery facilities. Also, under the brand name ‘Altunbilekler Sofrası’, a restaurant chain is active and throughallthese facilities, Altunbilekler provides hundreds of jobs for the region’s people. Currently, Altunbilekler has over 2700 employees in 84 shops, various plants, and restaurants, with growth plans to come.
“Our finance team is very grateful since their time to report delivery has shortened 9-fold. Backup-restore process has been dramatically improved. Backup time has fallen to 2 hours from 12; restore time has improved 6-fold and fallen to 1.5 hours.”
Murat Yagmur
IT Manager
Altunbilekler
The Challenge
SAP is utilised at Altunbilekler for key business functions such as Retail, Financial Reporting, Supply Chain Management, POS Data Management and Human Resources. The company used to have its infrastructure hosted by a provider in Istanbul; but due to performance issues migrated to an Ankara based provider.
But as growth continued, new problems like continuity and availability of systems arose along with old recurring performance problems. This negatively impacted in efficiency, timing and on time delivery; the information flow to management took a hit both in quality and timeliness and at some point daily operations were under constant interruption threat with unavailability of systems occurring more than once a day.
An imminent and sturdy alternative was needed to solve all current problems, to provide surplus performance for daily operations and support future growth plans while not increasing costs. Full continuity of business cycles, daily operations and reporting chains were critical during migration. All the infrastructure components and environmental integrations were migrated seamlessly.
Why Amazon Web Services
After evaluating on premises and cloud options, the company decided to go for Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud with Runibex who was its partner for their implementation of their SAP platform. Enhanced SAP performance, a fully structured and operative disaster recovery scenario, and reduced storage costs were the main targets at first stage. A cost model was developed and main saving points determined. Furthermore, a seamless and swift migration goal kept in mind, a total of 72 hours of migration time was programmed and realised.
The present structure has been migrated on to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The working environment was shifted to SUSE Linux for the sake of cost reduction. Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3) for data backups and AWS Elastic Block Store (AWS EBS) SSD volumes as storage are used. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) is used for user and access management.
The whole infrastructure is being watched by Amazon Cloudwatch. The Benefits The SAP environment, one of the most critical infrastructure pieces, has been moved to AWS swiftly, seamlessly and without problems.
“The most frequently used tabular report FBL5N used to submit its results after 24 minutes before the migration; now, it is well within 150 seconds. The overall costs have been reduced by 35%. To give a hint on how this cost reduction has happened; for instance, development and test environments are not needed to be run at nights or weekends, so they are automatically shut down.” Murat Yagmur, IT Manager, The end user experience has improved companywide.
SAP is used by staff to provide financial reports to management for critical decision making. Murat Yagmur mentions the feedback he has received “Our finance team is very grateful since their time to report delivery has shortened 9-fold. Backup-restore process has been dramatically improved. Backup time has fallen to 2 hours from 12; restore time has improved 6-fold and fallen to 1.5 hours.”