Client Profile
Gulf Medical Company is a Saudi-based supplier of medical equipment and devices to hospitals and other medical organizations across the Gulf region. The company was founded in 1983 with the aim of bringing innovative state-of-the-art medical technologies to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf markets and was subsequently acquired by the House of Naghi in 1992.
Project Scope and Strategy
The company used SAP’s S/4HANA for critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) for many years and relied on on-premises infrastructure to ensure the smooth running of its operations across the Middle East and North Africa region. However, with SAP releasing a new version of S/4HANA that would require higher specification hardware, Gulf Medical Company decided to update its infrastructure and migrate to the cloud using AWS.
The software update and migration to AWS meant that Gulf Medical Company could solve several other challenges posed by its aging on-premises servers. It wanted to take control of infrastructure costs and unlock true agility and innovation, bringing the ability to add new features quickly and easily.
With the support from AWS Partner and SAP Gold Partner Altivate, Gulf Medical Company has reduced costs, accelerated innovation, and improved reliability. In addition, the company has added a raft of new features, including analytics, disaster recovery, and security.
Challenges and Implementation
Gulf Medical Company needed to upgrade to a new release of SAP S/4HANA, but it also faced several related technical challenges. “If we needed to add a new feature or server, it could take up to 3 months to ship and install,” says Mokhtar Attiya, IT operations manager at Gulf Medical Company. “It was too slow. We needed to move much faster. On-premises maintenance costs were spiralling. We had to act.”
The company wanted to benefit from the reduced costs, increased reliability, and improved business agility of the cloud by migrating its SAP environment to AWS. This would help Gulf Medical Company support its strategic scaling plans while operating with a resilient infrastructure. The business wouldn’t just see significantly reduced infrastructure costs, it would help it bring innovative new features and processes to its customers much faster.
Gulf Medical Company chose Altivate to provide strategic consulting and migrate SAP from an on-premises data center to AWS. In addition, Altivate helped upgrade Gulf Medical Company’s SAP S/4HANA solution from version 18 to version 20. “It’s rare to find a partner with experience of SAP migrations and the architecture required,” says Attiya. “Altivate has great expertise in both SAP and AWS. They have a good sense of the application and infrastructure and gave us lots of advice on migrating. Any SAP migration is not an easy task.”
Much More than a Simple Lift and Shift
Crucially, both the migration and upgrade process needed to take place with minimal downtime to reduce the impact on business operations. The company’s sales, finance, staffing, and logistics departments depend on the SAP S/4HANA ERP system to ensure that medical supplies are distributed on time. “This was a complex project—we had to completely replatform our infrastructure and SAP S/4HANA workloads,” says Attiya. “We have 15 branches that all rely on the SAP system, so disruption had to be kept to a minimum.”
The planning and preparation took 2 months. Altivate and Gulf Medical Company worked with SAP and AWS to design the right solution to meet the business requirements. Gulf Medical Company managed its operations through SAP Field Service Management (FSM) to better serve its customers’ maintenance needs, integrating with SAP S/4HANA on AWS.
Altivate used AWS Launch Wizard, a service that simplifies SAP implementations on AWS by orchestrating the provisioning of AWS resources, to migrate Gulf Medical Company’s SAP solutions and modules to AWS. This included SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA Disaster Recovery, SAP HANA Studio, and SAP HANA System Copy. “AWS Launch Wizard made the process much faster, helping us make a potentially complicated and time-consuming process quick and simple. It’s a major benefit,” says Attiya.
The team also used the AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA, a backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. “From lower costs and faster time to market to improved backup and security, Gulf Medical Company is set to see countless benefits from this project,” says Ginu Francis, technology manager at Altivate. “Our expertise and AWS knowledge helped guarantee the project’s success. Gulf Medical Company can grow faster and operate even more smoothly.”
Business Impact
Optimizing its hardware compute resources also helps Gulf Medical Company control its system’s total cost of ownership.
“Our on-premises costs were $2 million over 5 years,” says Attiya. “AWS is projected to be 40% less over the same period, but with better performance and numerous other advantages. It’s a huge cost saving.”
Gulf Medical Company has upgraded to SAP S/4HANA 2020 modules, including finance, materials management, sales and distribution, customer service, and human capital management. By doing this, Gulf Medical Company has reduced the cost of its sandbox servers and activities.
The migration has given Gulf Medical Company the agility and elasticity to deal with changing business demands. It can now scale its capabilities with confidence across the Gulf region and make faster, data-driven decisions. Part of the migration included the deployment of SAP Analytics Cloud, running on AWS. SAP Analytics Cloud integrates with SAP HANA to give Gulf Medical Company insights on new business leads, helping the company make better sales and revenue decisions. “SAP Analytics Cloud running on AWS has had a huge impact on our business,” says Attiya. “We can now see data-driven dashboards that guide our business decisions. It has already helped us boost sales performance and increase revenue.”
Running SAP on AWS has provided further benefits for Gulf Medical Company, including automation, load balancing, improved security, and increased uptime. “With AWS, I can launch a full environment in 15 days or less,” says Attiya. “It used to be 3 months. It means we can now deliver projects faster and deliver a better service to clients and stay ahead of our competitors.”
Finally, using AWS infrastructure dramatically improves Gulf Medical Company’s ERP uptime.
“We’ve not had one issue with AWS service so far,” Attiya says. “We used to have regular downtime, translating to around 90% uptime. But now uptime is 99%.”
