T&G innovate to land an Australasian first

T&G is New Zealand's leading distributor, marketer and exporter of premium quality fresh produce. With a distinguished history dating back to 1897, T&G enjoyed steady expansion before listing on the NZ stock exchange (NZX) in 2004 with ambitions of further overseas growth and business acquisitions. Today T&G is a global organisation and employs more than 1,300 people with more than 2,000 seasonal workers across 13 countries. 

The Challenge

As a growing international company, T&G wanted a single Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that would provide an integrated, real-time view of its core business process, enable better collaboration globally and enhance overall business agility. T&G wanted to host the system on a cloud-based platform, which would allow the company to deploy servers anywhere in the world without the need or cost of setting up and maintaining a data centre. After selecting SAP S/4 as their ERP system, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen as the preferred cloud-based platform. T&G’s global infrastructure could then incorporate future growth by deploying applications close to its end-users and then scale to match growth far more efficiently. The agility and flexibility of this platform also meant no upfront costs or commitments when looking to expand its storage or network infrastructure in the future.

The Datacom Difference

Datacom is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner and member of the AWS Managed Service Programme. Together with a team of in-house engineers certified to host SAP services, Datacom proposed a complete end- to-end cloud hosting service in May 2016. This included designing and building the AWS infrastructure from scratch, as well as providing ongoing support, monitoring and maintenance of the new platform. 

Results

The solution design phase saw Datacom deliver results by leveraging our partnership with AWS to design a solution that mixed the SAP HANA and Sybase ASE platforms. This design allowed T&G to migrate its systems from its legacy equipment, while simultaneously limiting hosting costs by reducing resource sizing and existing licences. Datacom staggered the deployments to align with T&G’s release cycle so that the customer only had to pay for instances as and when they were required. This was the first SAP HANA on AWS project undertaken by Datacom in Australia and New Zealand, and the entire project came in on budget and was completed in less than three months. Following DevOps methodology, T&G can now create test systems in hours rather than weeks, saving on labour costs and achieving significantly faster response times.