Key Food Modernizes on AWS to Support Expansion

"To go live hours before store operations kicked off without any issues was incredible. It was the smoothest SAP project in Key Food history."

~ Michaele Domnisch, Senior Director of IT

Challenge

With plans for expansion of 60+ stores annually underway, Key Food IT leadership was challenged to sunset all disparate homegrown systems and move to one enterprise solution - SAP. After one year of running SAP on HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud), the team looked for an alternative that provided elasticity, autoscaling, and greater control over their cloud environment.

Focused on improving system performance while in growth mode, Key Food’s IT Team sought a cloud environment that offered both agility and sustainability for the business, along with a managed services provider who had both deep SAP experience and cloud management expertise.

Solution

Protera, the first to migrate SAP on AWS, was selected to design, architect, and migrate Key Food’s entire SAP footprint from HEC to AWS. After just 16-weeks, Protera cutover the new production systems over a weekend. On Monday morning, all 380 locations were able to query systems for items, pricing and promotions, and place just in time inventory PO requests without any system performance call outs.

“This was big for Key Food- it was major, and it was risky,” says Michaele Domnisch, Senior Director of IT. “To go live hours before operations kicked off without any issues the following morning was incredible. It was the smoothest SAP project in Key Food history.”

Along with a team of highly skilled resources supporting the business 24/7/365, Protera provides the Key Food team with expanded comprehensive Basis support and a proprietary cloud management platform providing full visibility into system monitoring, cloud architecture on AWS, performance metrics, and cloud spend.

Months after initial go-live, the Key Food team engaged Protera in a BOBJ application upgrade. The project was completed ahead of schedule with minimal downtime. “Protera’s technical expertise is impressive,” says Satish Verma Pasagadugula, Lead Enterprise Architect at Key Food. “They navigated complex technical challenges and ensured a seamless transition to the upgraded systems. The following day, all morning reports were delivered without a hitch.”

Looking into the future

The transformation of their SAP environment provided a 35% total cost of ownership savings, with a 2X increase in performance, setting the stage for future modernization initiatives to support expansion.

With a sound technology foundation, a secure and rightsized modern cloud environment, and a partner they can count on, the Key Food team is well positioned for the next phase of growth.