The Campbell Soup Company is an iconic food company that produces meals, beverages, and snacks and generates more than USD8 billion in annual revenue. To improve reliability and availability and build greater flexibility and scalability into its core SAP environments, especially after its large acquisition of Snyder’s-Lance—Campbell migrated to SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure. The company runs a single global instance of SAP, which has helped it greatly reduce downtime, make manufacturing more resilient, and gain deeper insights into its supply chain.
“We’re now running our business on a platform that has high availability, scalability, and improved resiliency. With the delivery of our entire SAP landscape on Azure, we can now make it fully resilient for both planned and unplanned downtime.”
Kevin Rice, Head of the Infrastructure and Application Platforms Domain, Campbell Soup Company
For families all over the world, Campbell’s is a beloved household name. But those iconic red and white cans represent just one of the brands made by Campbell Soup Company. Under some of the world’s favorite snack, meal, and beverage brands—including Pepperidge Farm, Swanson, and V8—the Camden, New Jersey–based company generates annual sales of more than USD8 billion. And its ever-classic feel and 152-year history notwithstanding, Campbell continues to evolve and transform.
Not surprisingly, a company as large as Campbell, with a long list of subsidiaries, has a huge amount of data to manage, store, and learn from in order to run efficiently and best serve its customers. Campbell’s 2018 acquisition of Snyder’s-Lance, a leading snack food and pretzel brand with massive amounts of data, further motivated Campbell to modernize.
The company drove IT transformation by migrating its SAP environments to run on Microsoft Azure. Its success led to an even bigger data migration when the entire company moved to SAP HANA on Azure.
A head-first and cloud-first migration
For years, the company had continuously made modest progress toward improving the reliability and resiliency of its SAP systems. However, it took too much effort and time to achieve these milestones. In 2018, a new push for operational excellence, agility, and flexibility prompted the decision to look for a different datacenter provider and leave its downtime and reliability frustrations behind.
The Snyder’s-Lance acquisition spurred Campbell to integrate its new subsidiary’s legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system data into its global SAP environment and re-architect its entire SAP environment to run on SAP HANA.
Campbell evaluated different providers and ultimately decided to migrate its Snyder’s-Lance data and all Campbell SAP workloads to SAP HANA on Azure. The company opted for Azure because Campbell already had a strategic enterprise relationship with Microsoft, and it saw a much stronger solution in Microsoft hybrid cloud offerings, which aligned with its roadmap to reduce on-premises hosting requirements.
“Making the decision to proceed and establish our guiding principle of ‘Cloud First,’ we rallied our IT organization and our business leaders to support our journey to the cloud." says Kevin Rice, Head of the Infrastructure and Application Platforms Domain at Campbell Soup Company. "At the time, we didn’t have all the answers on how we would achieve it, but we did know the decision to migrate to Azure would far exceed anything we could provide in a traditional datacenter offering. We also knew that our ability to design and prepare for high availability was going to be much greater.”
Things took off quickly from there—and it only took around 12 months to complete the initial migration. Campbell IT staff worked closely with specialists from Khoj Information Technology, an SAP Silver Partner and a Microsoft partner with multiple Gold competencies and an advanced specialization for SAP on Azure workloads.
The Khoj team had been a long-term, trusted managed services partner at Campbell, supporting the Campbell SAP ERP environment for more than 12 years and possessed sound institutional and technical knowledge around Campbell’s SAP systems and landscape. In partnership with Campbell’s IT team, they began by modernizing Campbell’s existing SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC), Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM), and Process Orchestration (SAP PO) workloads on SAP and migrating those environments to Azure virtual machines certified for SAP.
More data capacity
Next, the team worked on integrating the Snyder’s-Lance business into Campbell’s SAP ECC environment on Azure. The team not only consolidated the Snyder’s-Lance data, but it also successfully doubled the SAP HANA preproduction, production, disaster recovery (DR), and quality assurance environments in Azure from 6 terabytes (TB) to 12 TB.
Working alongside the Campbell IT team, the Khoj team architected high availability and disaster recovery environments and helped ensure that the move to the SAP HANA in-memory database met Campbell’s volume and performance expectations. The project team also maintained an N+1 landscape and constantly evolving requirements for various environments for development, testing, training, and production support. Campbell set up the workloads to run on multiple M-Series Azure Virtual Machines nodes for high availability and disaster recovery.
“Campbell’s technical architecture took advantage of the highest available virtual SAP HANA instance size: M416msv2 with 11.5 TB memory and 416 virtual CPUs,” says Ajay Dhingra, President and Chief Architect of Khoj Information Technology. “A highly available and DR-ready SAP architecture with no single point of failure was built with SAP HANA and SUSE Pacemaker cluster.” Network file server high availability was built using SoftNAS and eliminated the single point of failure of all SAP user connections with the highly available SAP Web Dispatcher.
Before going live with SAP HANA on Azure for its full SAP landscape, Campbell conducted 19 “dry runs” of its production migration. “We needed to make sure that the entire end-to-end process was meticulously scripted—with every step accounted for and timed before we shut the entire business down,” Rice says.
“Each of these 19 dry runs helped alleviate some concern we were seeing in the overall run time. If you were to actually plot it on a graph, you would see a downward trajectory from 40-plus hours down to less than 24 hours to do the technical piece of it. And then we did the whole migration in 36 hours with the business validation.”
Ajay Dhingra, President and Chief Architect, Khoj Information Technology
After dry runs, analysis, and creative system tuning, Campbell used its increased data scale to achieve significant performance improvements in its production environment: a 40 percent reduction in transaction response time, up to a 90-percent reduction in archiving jobs runtime, and up to an 80 percent reduction in key batch runtime.
“Our SAP on Azure journey was completed with an on-time migration of SAP ECC, SCM, and PO to SAP HANA 2.0, with more than 100 virtual machines, over 15 systems, 15-plus TB, and five new technologies,” says Prashant Srinivasan, Director of Enterprise Applications Platforms and Integration at Campbell. “We converted 22 TBs of data to SAP HANA in less than 12 hours.”
Adds Rice, “We used our expanded compute capacity in Azure to reduce migration downtime by more than half. We would not have been able to do any of that in a traditional datacenter without standing up the entire identical compute infrastructure.”
Becoming a more resilient business
Having accomplished its SAP migration to Azure, Campbell is enjoying running its business-critical SAP systems on Azure with the added confidence of increased availability and performance that Azure offers.
"We previously did not have this level of flexibility and agility or the ability to scale the way we do today with Azure.” says Rice.
The move to Azure has also freed the Campbell IT team from its previous maintenance burden to tackle higher-value, strategic work related to business needs. The team learned important lessons around networking, disaster recovery, and reserved instances. And it plans to apply its new proficiency in executing and operating SAP on Azure to help the company with future expansion, such as easily adding new workloads or integrating new acquisitions.
Campbell’s decision to unite its data and systems on Azure in one global SAP HANA environment boosts visibility into its supply chain and makes traceability easier, which are key factors for a multinational consumer goods company. So is resiliency. Campbell relies heavily on many manufacturing plants to supply its products. Manufacturing must run 24 hours a day, but Rice says that in the past, the IT team had brief downtime windows to perform system maintenance—and those windows have shrunk considerably due to the increased demand for Campbell’s products as a result of COVID-19.
“We’re now running our business on a platform that has high availability, scalability, and improved resiliency,” says Rice. “With the delivery of our entire SAP landscape on Azure, we can now make it fully resilient for both planned and unplanned downtime. Now that we have high availability at the Azure and SAP platform stacks, we are focused on bolstering the SAP ecosystem, allowing us to perform rolling system maintenance, whether it’s a planned disruption like a patching event or an unplanned disruption."
This directly ties to Campbell’s priorities of both providing a resilient food system and supporting its employees. “We want to do everything we can to help our frontline workers and keep manufacturing going,” Rice says. “These employees are actually hands-on producing product. When we take our systems down for maintenance, it affects their ability to produce. Continuing to decrease downtime is a primary IT objective for this fiscal year. That’s where we’ll focus in the immediate future.”
Find out more about Campbell Soup Company on Twitter and LinkedIn.
“We want to do everything we can to help our frontline workers and keep manufacturing going. These employees are actually hands-on producing product. When we take our systems down for maintenance, it affects their ability to produce. Addressing that is a primary objective for this fiscal year. That’s where we’ll focus in the immediate future.”
Kevin Rice, Head of the Infrastructure and Application Platforms Domain, Campbell Soup Company
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