Briscoes Homeware, the 150-year-old New Zealand retailer with 85 stores and more than $700 million in annual sales, needed to modernise its SAP infrastructure and chart a path toward S/4HANA – weighing cloud deployment model, migration strategy and timeline against the risk of disrupting a retail operation running on massive datasets.
Realtech, Briscoes’ SAP architecture partner of more than 14 years, recommended a risk-mitigating two-step conversion: moving first to SAP Business Suite on HANA on new on-premise hardware, with the conversion to S/4HANA to follow.
The first step alone cut database size by 80%, reduced backup times by 25%, improved database restore speed by 75% and left reports running three times faster than before.