Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, today announced that Pick n Pay Group (JSE: PIK), a leading retail business operating in South African and other selected African countries, has migrated its entire on-premises information technology (IT) infrastructure to AWS. Pick n Pay worked with Lemongrass Consulting—an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with Migration and SAP Consulting Competencies—to migrate its on-premises SAP environment to AWS and implement a modern SAP HANA platform. Moving to the cloud will enable Pick n Pay to streamline its operations and modernize the supply chain network for its stores, develop new digital customer experiences in omnichannel grocery, and expand into new areas of business.
“Leveraging the cloud to achieve greater operational efficiency and improved customer experiences is a game-changing strategy for Pick n Pay and the South African retail sector. The cloud will help us stay relevant and accessible in a high-volume, low-margin marketplace that demands efficiency above all else,.“In addition, the new cloud-based business intelligence platform enables us to make even more data-driven decisions that can help us deliver lower prices and more value to our customers.”
Chris Shortt, Chief Information & Technology Officer at Pick n Pay
The retailer is using AWS’s unmatched cloud services—including compute, storage, databases, analytics and business intelligence, and AWS Marketplace—to automate Pick n Pay’s operations, deliver real-time insights, and identify and purchase AWS Partner Network (APN) offerings. By analyzing data in the cloud, the retailer can forecast demand, identify customer patterns and sentiment, and improve the in-store and online shopping experience for customers. With AWS, Pick n Pay can dynamically scale its infrastructure resources in line with business demand and peak retail seasons. This elasticity helps Pick n Pay scale its online shopping services, which run on AWS, to serve thousands of South African customers during its busiest shopping periods and holidays. AWS has given Pick n Pay the ability to perform market testing and develop viable products quickly and cost-effectively, which has helped the retailer remain at the forefront of retail innovation on the African continent. Modernizing its SAP workloads with AWS provides Pick n Pay the capability to connect operations, sales, and customer survey and loyalty data across its organization. The new SAP environment will run on AWS to support the company’s online and physical sales channels, accessing capabilities such as machine learning and analytics, to streamline its supply chain network, forecast inventory, and conduct detailed market analysis to offer the right retail mix of merchandise.
Lemongrass, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, enables customers like Pick n Pay to migrate mission-critical SAP (including SAP S/4HANA) and non-SAP workloads to AWS, and also manages these workloads with the highest levels of automation and agility. Lemongrass designed a solution for Pick n Pay using the Lemongrass Platform and its proven templates and patterns to migrate, operate, and automate their SAP workloads. In addition, Pick n Pay used AWS Application Migration Service (CloudEndure Migration) to simplify and expedite moving 185 non-SAP workloads to the cloud. “Forward-thinking companies like Pick n Pay are modernizing their systems by migrating to AWS,” said Eamonn O’Neill, chief technology officer at Lemongrass Consulting. “Based on our work with our Cloud Cost Calculator, we typically see potential cost savings of between 45% and 75% resulting from this strategy. These are savings that can then fund initiatives, such as new offerings and tools that deliver superior retail experiences, and drive additional value for the business, such as business intelligence and automation.” “We are seeing a fundamental change in how consumer goods companies run their technology infrastructures,” said Chris Erasmus, Country Manager of South Africa at Amazon Web Services. “Pick n Pay is the first South African retailer to join the thousands of customers that run SAP on AWS, using AWS’s reliable and scalable global infrastructure and proven SAP experience to provide key insights, drive innovation, and support the creation of new products and services. We look forward to working with Pick n Pay on its SAP and digital transformation strategies that will help speed the introduction of new cloud-based customer experiences like its mobile app, tailored shopping, and personalized offers that deepen the consumer relationship.” Backed by its unmatched experience in running SAP workloads, AWS helps customers get the best performance and most value out of their mission-critical SAP platforms. Running SAP on AWS gives customers the control and confidence to securely run their business using the most reliable and scalable infrastructure, the broadest set of cloud capabilities, and the largest community of technology partners to help with SAP migration and modernization.
About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic regions, with announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. .
About Pick n Pay
The Pick n Pay Group is a retail business in the fast-moving consumer goods industry. We operate through multiple store formats under three brands – Pick n Pay, Boxer and TM Supermarkets. Pick n Pay also operates one of the largest online grocery platforms in sub-Saharan Africa. Our honorary life president and consumer champion Raymond Ackerman purchased the first four Pick n Pay stores in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1967. Today, the Pick n Pay Group operates over 2 000 stores across multiple formats in eight countries across southern Africa, including a 49% investment in TM Supermarkets in Zimbabwe.
Customers are at the heart of our business. Consumer sovereignty informs everything we do, from how we treat our customers, the product range we offer, to how we design our stores. Putting the customer first means we work hard to understand their diverse and changing needs and how we can serve them better.
About Lemongrass
Lemongrass is a software-enabled services provider, synonymous with SAP on Cloud, focused on delivering superior, highly automated Managed Services to Enterprise customers. With a unique combination of experience, expertise and best practices designed to deliver the desired outcomes from an SAP transformation, Lemongrass engineers strategies and services that enable the economics, scale and agility of hyperscale computing while unlocking business innovation and controlling the risks and uncertainties. Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) enables near zero downtime migrations to Cloud and differentiated Managed Services for SAP and its related workloads. Our customers span multiple verticals and geographies across the Americas, EMEA and APAC.