Client Background

• Client: International Convenience stores company 
• Industry type: Retail 
• Products/ Core Business: Everyday staples (food and beverages), gasoline, financial services 
• Geography: 17 countries 
• Number of stores: 68,236 worldwide (2019)
  

Challenge

The client’s walkup store format depends on the ability to stay in sync with consumption patterns, meet local tastes and ensure immediate availability of products. It, therefore, requires real-time visibility into its inventory—without which the client could have loss of sales and dissatisfied customers or/and add to storage costs. With the client’s IT infrastructure using a number of disparate technologies, in addition to the server and storage not being scalable, it was necessary to upgrade and standardize the environment to meet business goals.

Solution

After examining the client’s application environment, the decision to implement the following solutions was taken:

• Migrate SAP and non-SAP business applications and data to an on-premises datacenter for production and on-cloud for non-production
  
• Upgrade SAP ECC6 and SAP BW
• Consolidate production systems that were in two different datacenters
  
• Standardize the hardware operating system and database environment to support business needs
  

Some of the related activities undertaken as part of the solution included infrastructure setup, ECC migration to BSOH, SAP non-ECC migration, non-SAP application migration, Data Archival Strategy, Disaster Recovery, ABAP Remediation, ABAP Optimization and Integration Testing.

Wipro’s proprietary ‘Safe Passage to HANA’ approach was used. This enabled HANA compatibility and technical validation with other SAP components and in architecting and designing the solution. HANA-AN, a tool developed by Wipro, was used to identify all mandatory fixes required for a successful Suite on HANA (SoH) migration.

Business Impact

The shift of custom applications to HANA and consolidation of datacenters provided real-time visibility into warehouse inventory, improving the client’s ability to manage inventory levels, meet demand and boost store performance. The other benefits included: