Amica Moves Faster and Becomes More Agile with a Transition to SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA has redefined how businesses use data. It offers faster processing and real-time analytics, allowing users to manage everything from manufacturing to customer service. The latest version of the powerful SAP ERP suite is data-source agnostic, leveraging AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to help companies streamline, optimize, and automate processes.

It also requires high-performance infrastructure with ample storage, bandwidth, and scalability. To make the most of SAP S/4HANA, Amica needed a significant network overhaul.

Staying ahead of our business needs

Amica Group is a leading European manufacturer of household appliances and one of Poland's most valuable brands, with nearly 70 years of experience. Our product range includes a full selection of large and small domestic appliances, sold under the Amica brand (in Central and Western Europe), Hansa (in Eastern Europe and Asia), Gram (in the Nordic countries), CDA (in the United Kingdom), and Fagor (in Spain). Globally, we employ nearly 3,000 people, delivering around 4 million appliances annually to customers across nearly 70 markets worldwide.

As Amica’s Core Business Infrastructure Manager, I oversee our worldwide network, primary data center, and branch office equipment. Our company is digitally agile and needs robust infrastructure we can manage from a central location to sustain innovation, run the core applications that power our business, and prevent unauthorized use of our resources.

Amica’s IT department tries to stay a step ahead of the business. We strive to understand our internal use cases to anticipate the company’s IT needs and prepare for any incoming requirements. We monitor the volume of data moving across our systems and the processing power required to perform our day-to-day tasks and operate our enterprise systems. Our colleagues just want things to work, and it’s up to my team to make it happen.

Enhancing our HPE environment

Over the years, we have modernized and centralized our robust global backbone. Centralization is critical to keeping the company agile in an ever-evolving market, especially as innovations and applications increasingly demand faster, more powerful systems.

To maintain our position as Europe’s top appliance manufacturer, we are recently updating our ERP, switching from SAP ECC (ahead of its 2027 end-of-support date) to SAP S/4HANA. The migration will allow us to leverage SAP’s latest enterprise tools to manage our core business while enhancing our access to SAP HANA’s real-time data analytics, search, and integration tools, along with the speed and power of its in-memory processing and machine learning functionalities.

The transition to SAP S/4HANA requires many changes, especially as we wanted to keep our HANA instance on-prem instead of using a public cloud. Amica needed separate servers with faster processors and more memory to accelerate database read and write speeds and boost enterprise application performance.

Historically, our vendor of choice has been Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). We employ HPE solutions, including HPE Aruba networking technology, to ensure seamless global operations and smooth communications across remote branches.  

To maximize efficiency, we decided to use HPE Synergy composable blade infrastructure to run most of our enterprise applications in virtualized environments. Then, we added the high-performance, AI-ready HPE Scale-up Compute and HPE ProLiant DL380 gen10 servers to manage the memory-intensive workloads of our SAP databases. 

To master our new infrastructure and ensure a performant, reliable production environment, we set up a trial of our updated HPE servers and SAP S/4 HANA installation at one of our branches. With HPE’s help, we configured our test environment within a month. After putting our test environment through its paces for six months, we are ready to update our primary data center and roll out our new ERP company-wide.

We're faster and more reliable with SAP S/4HANA

We have now started to use SAP S/4HANA to manage every aspect of our business. Our test environment demonstrates the speed and high performance of our HPE-powered environment. With the addition of HPE Synergy and HPE Compute scale-up servers, reports that took hours to generate now take minutes. 

This effect will be transformative when we scale these efficiencies company-wide and across all enterprise applications. Once everything is in place, this new environment will allow our teams to access critical data in real time and make faster decisions.

At the same time, our new environment will be more reliable, as it’s now highly available and redundant. We backed up our servers, applications, network connections, and databases and can automatically switch to secondary systems in case of an equipment failure or network outage. The process will be seamless so that end users won’t experience any disruptions.

Invaluable support to help drive business growth

Working with HPE offers more than reliable hardware. We also subscribe to HPE Complete Care support, and my team regularly meets with HPE architects and engineers to discuss our future needs and plan infrastructure upgrades. Our proactive partnership enables Amica to stay ahead of business requirements and make sure we’re never caught unprepared.

HPE support has been particularly valuable during the migration. Amica has a small IT department, and our infrastructure team is even smaller. Although we are centralizing and automating infrastructure management, we can’t do everything on our own. We rely on HPE support to minimize infrastructure downtime, reduce production schedule disruptions, improve on-time deliveries, and ensure ongoing system reliability. Their comprehensive support helps us choose, configure, and manage our core infrastructure so we can move faster and smoothly integrate new technology into our everyday operations. I can sleep better knowing HPE professionals offer 24/7 support and can step in to guide or assist us with any issue.

HPE Complete Care also is incredibly cost-effective. Instead of hiring full-time support staff, we can assign our in-house engineers to projects that benefit Amica’s users and improve business outcomes.

HPE is a long-term strategic partner contributing to Amica’s continuous improvements and ongoing success. More than 25,000 customers run SAP applications on HPE infrastructure, and the company’s consultants have deployed over 40,000 SAP HANA servers, including ours. I can’t think of a better partner to help us streamline, optimize, and automate infrastructure management so we can focus on becoming more agile and driving business growth.