La Europea migrates from SAP HEC to GCP with Novis services

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“Creators of the best shopping experience for wines, spirits, and gourmet products in Mexico since 1953”, is La Europea’s slogan, a gourmet space with the largest offer in services and food in the Aztec country. Always seeking to innovate and improve its client services, the company migrated from SAP HEC to GCP aiming at cost reduction and better services: scalability, flexibility, security, and high availability.

La Europea is a one hundred percent Mexican company that has permanently strived to provide exclusivity to its clients, and so in 1986 it established its own importer and offers products that cannot be found anywhere else: specialty wines and food – such as the famous Norwegian bacalao, which has become a family tradition to purchase it in La Europea – the baguette imported from France, elvers, caviar, Serrano ham, among many others. Currently the leading brand in its sector, the company offers the world’s best products and a vast catalogue of products and services, with more than 3,800 wines from 14 countries, 3,100 spirits and distillates, prepared meals, as well as custom services, such as “My Event”, winetasting (in person and virtual; private and public), workshops, etc.

More than 1,100 staff members work in 62 stores and 6 distribution centers. Their current strategic goals include developing a powerful e-commerce platform and increasing sales and margins. For this reason, they have an active presence in social networks and have integrated the operation with delivery services such as Rappi, Amazon, and Mercado Libre. Also, since the beginning of this year, they are selling products through their own online store at https://www.laeuropea.com.mx/.

Migration project: from SAP HEC solutions to GCP

Sergio Arturo García Corona, IT and Processes Manager at La Europea Mexico, points out that the main motivation to start this project was operation costs reduction. “Since 2019, my team and I have succeeded in reducing from 10% to 15% our costs in one year. We have also been implementing profitable projects, generating extra revenues for the company”. He says that during 2020, the impact of the pandemic forced them to pursue increased savings, particularly regarding the SAP HEC platform maintenance cost.

“We have all been hit by the pandemic, having to close stores, dry law, restricted hours, with a significant impact on sales. We explored several strategies, arriving finally to the SAP HEC migration to GCP. The Set Up times had to be aggressive, and we also sought – besides an excellent service – the possibility of scalability, flexibility, security, and high availability”, he says.

Why did you choose Novis’ services?

“When I asked the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) team for a SAP expert, they gave me their partners list, among which was Novis. I already knew them, having worked in 2014 in a similar project, in another company, and immediately thought it was the ideal partner. I requested to do it with Novis since the initial project’s negotiations”, says Sergio García.

Novis’ solution for the SAP HEC to GCP migration

Iñigo Artiagoitia, Business Development Manager at Novis, points out that: “The solution proposed to La Europea ensures its SAP solutions operational continuity and is based in a proven service model, endorsed by more than 15 years of experience and certified by SAP. It provides 24 x 7 support, is based on ITIL practices, and includes the following services:

• GCP hosting
• Infrastructure, operating system, and database management
• SAP technical operations
• Monitoring
• Backups and recovery
• IT services management (service desk, incident and problem management)
• Solution Manager as a service, including EWA reports

All La Europea’s services are handled with Service Delivery Manager (SDM) by Novis, who is responsible for SLA compliance.

The systems included in Novis’ services for La Europea are: S/4HANA, SAP Fiori, SAP CAR, SAP EWM, SAP PO, SAP SLT, SAP Web Dispatcher, and SAP Cloud Connector. The Production, Quality, and Development environments for each of these systems are included”.

Project evaluation

Sergio García evaluates the project and its current results: “I give it the highest grade, a 10, for we planned the project for four months and it worked like clockwork during that period, ending on January 15, 2021.

We have been migrated for three months now and are satisfied, the system has had no downtimes and we have obtained the expected benefits, besides reducing costs:

• User response times were reduced.
• Reporting requirements support times were improved.
• We receive a more personalized support.
• I am confident that in case of problems, I escalate these to Novis and they will be responsible for the follow-up with Google and/or SAP.
• We have tasks visibility and road maps to keep the systems up to date.

What would you recommend to others who are currently evaluating similar projects?

“I believe a detailed follow-up is most important, with frequent meetings to identify risks before they become a problem, and to search for solutions making timely decisions that allow to meet the established plan.

Also, it was key to involve all our IT teams, making them all participants and responsible, and not one single area, that is, those from applications, telecom infrastructure, basis, security, etc.

Finally, another most important issue was to involve the user areas, so they could help with control data and give their approval, confirming that the migration was correct. In this way, they could corroborate that we obtained better response times and were satisfied with the project”, concludes the IT Manager at La Europea.

We invite you to contact us for more information about SAP HEC to GCP migrations.

Article by Gilda Valderrama, Novis Bulletin editor.