St-Hubert Drives Innovation, Agility, and Growth by Running SAP on AWS
About St-Hubert
St-Hubert is a chain of Canadian casual dining and fast casual restaurants known for its rotisserie chicken. A part of Recipe Unlimited group, St-Hubert has more than 110 restaurants across Canada and distributes more than 300 food products to Canadian grocery stores.
Executive Summary
St-Hubert uses AWS services to migrate SAP applications to AWS in less than 20 hours, focus on innovation instead of IT, scale new environments in minutes instead of weeks, and ensure 24/7 access to critical applications. Based in Montreal, Quebec, St-Hubert is a leading Canadian restaurant chain and food manufacturer. Working with AWS Partner TeamWork, St-Hubert migrated its SAP application environment to AWS using services such as CloudEndure Migration and AWS Transit Gateway.
Seeking Innovation in a Competitive Market
St-Hubert, based in Montreal, is Quebec’s leading rotisserie chicken chain, with more than 110 restaurants across Quebec and the Maritimes. The company also manufactures and distributes more than 300 food products to Canadian grocery chains. Founded in 1951, St-Hubert is part of Recipe Unlimited group, Canada’s oldest and largest full-service restaurant company.
St-Hubert relies heavily on an SAP infrastructure to support business-critical functions such as sales, finance, manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and quality management. “We use SAP for 95 percent of our processes. It is an essential technology for our business,” says Eric Leboeuf, Senior Director of Business Technology at St-Hubert. However, the company’s on-premises SAP environment was aging. “We had to make a quick decision to either upgrade or replace it. Increasingly, our company had developed a cloud-first strategy, so we began thinking seriously about moving SAP to the cloud,” says Leboeuf. Additionally, St-Hubert needed more business agility to keep pace with growth. “Running in an on-premises infrastructure, we lacked the elasticity, agility, and scalability we needed to grow the business and innovate in a very competitive market.”
Working with TeamWork to move SAP to AWS in less than 20 Hours
Committed to its cloud-first strategy, St-Hubert decided to move its SAP application environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “AWS was the right choice because it was the first and largest cloud provider for SAP,” says Leboeuf. “Also, our parent company had successfully been using AWS for several months, and we saw how robust and comprehensive AWS services are.”
After selecting AWS, St-Hubert engaged TeamWork—an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and an AWS SAP Competency Partner—for assistance in migrating its SAP applications to the cloud. “TeamWork has significant experience migrating SAP environments to AWS, so the choice was easy,” Leboeuf says. Together with St-Hubert, TeamWork migrated all SAP workloads, which run on 23 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The company also took advantage of CloudEndure Migration to streamline the move and AWS CloudFormation to create network, security, and VPN capabilities. In addition, TeamWork used AWS Transit Gateway to connect St-Hubert’s virtual private cloud and on-premises networks via a central hub.
TeamWork set up AWS Instance Scheduler to manage costs for evenings and weekends when instances aren’t needed, and it deployed AWS Backup for disaster recovery. “TeamWork provided us with a turnkey solution, which made the entire migration seamless,” says Leboeuf.
TeamWork completed the migration quickly, which was important because St-Hubert required a fast turnaround for an infrastructure-as-code project. “It was the end of our fiscal year, so it was critical we migrated SAP to support all our planned projects. We also had to upgrade our SAP environment to SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016,” says Leboeuf. “TeamWork helped us do the entire migration in less than 20 hours, so we avoided downtime for our SAP users.”
Driving Business Innovation
By moving its SAP applications to AWS, St-Hubert has freed its IT employees from spending their time managing infrastructure. Now, St-Hubert can support its cloud-first strategy and emphasize innovation by focusing entirely on its core business. “We are in the restaurant and food manufacturing business, not IT,” says Leboeuf. “Running SAP on AWS, we can focus on selling chicken and finding new ways to reach customers because we no longer have to spend our time procuring servers and troubleshooting.” For example, St-Hubert is putting more time into developing mobile apps and enhancing existing applications. “Managing the backend environment is now the responsibility of TeamWork and AWS, so I don’t have to manage capex and asset amortization,” Leboeuf says.
Scaling in minutes instead of weeks
St-Hubert can now quickly spin up servers to handle overall growth. “AWS gives us the elasticity to scale up or down as needed, whenever we have to, to ensure we are meeting demand for our products,” says Leboeuf. “As an example, we recently ran out of space in our SAP BW environment, and we scaled up new compute and storage capacity in minutes. In the old on-premises environment, that would have taken hours and possibly weeks if we needed to purchase and provision everything.”
The company has also given its developers more agility. “If our developers or QA testers need to do stress tests on production environments, they can just create a sandbox environment on AWS, use it for a few days, and scale it back down,” says Leboeuf. “This is going to help us move faster on future projects and initiatives.”
Delivering Reliable, 24/7 Application Access
The organization is taking advantage of the reliability of AWS to ensure delivery of critical SAP applications to more than 400 employees, 24/7. “We know we won’t have any downtime because we’re getting high availability in multiple regions. Using AWS, I can sleep better at night knowing our employees always have access to the SAP applications they need to do their jobs every day, whether that means processing customer orders or shipping out products,” says Leboeuf.
St-Hubert continues to expand its SAP implementation on AWS. “We are currently migrating our SAP BW system from SQL Server to SAP HANA, and that process will be easier and more efficient because we are already running on AWS,” Leboeuf says. “Overall, we are no longer limited by our infrastructure. Whatever projects we embark on, we are confident we will complete them on budget and on time by relying on AWS.”
