Case Study with Campbell Soup Company

The Campbell Soup Company, a snack and beverage company with annual revenue of over USD8 billion, wanted to improve reliability and availability, in addition, to building greater flexibility and scalability into its core SAP environments. With its acquisition of Snyder’s-Lance, this need was intensified.

Fueled by its futuristic visions and the acquisition of Synder’s-Lance, Campbell went for a head-first cloud transformation aided by Khoj Information Technology – a move that increased its capacity to handle large amounts of data. Today, the company runs a single global instance of SAP and enjoys reduced downtimes, resilient manufacturing, and deep insights into its supply chain.

Challenge

Campbell’s, a beloved household name, represents not just the brand’s world-famous canned soup but a host of other brands including Pepperidge Farm, Swanson, and V8. Celebrating over 150 years of producing some of the world’s favorite snacks, meals, and beverages, this New Jersey-based company boasts of an annual sale crossing USD8 billion.

Campbell’s huge revenue along with its long list of subsidiaries is a natural predecessor to humongous amounts of data that need to be managed, stored, and processed. The need to learn from this data to serve its customers better became evident with Campbell’s acquisition of Snyder’s-Lance, a leading snack food and pretzel brand with massive amounts of data. Clearly, Campbell required a radical IT transformation.

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. Finally, in 2018, a new push for operational excellence, agility, and flexibility prompted the decision to look for a different data center provider and leave its downtime and reliability frustrations behind.

Solution

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’s 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.”

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 of 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.

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 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.

Results

Having accomplished its SAP migration to Azure, Campbell is currently 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.

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 coupled with resiliency are key factors for a multinational consumer goods company. furthermore, Campbell relies heavily on 24-hour operative manufacturing plants to supply its products. Earlier, the IT team had brief downtime windows to perform system maintenance, windows that 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