De’Longhi: Brewing Improved Customer Journeys with SAP Data on Google Cloud

De’ Longhi Group, perhaps best known for its coffee machines, has grown to include five consumer brands since the De’ Longhi family founded the company in 1974. Today the company makes products that span the kitchen counter, as well as a line of heating and cooling units. In all, De’ Longhi Group operates five production facilities and 70 international subsidiaries that support sales to more than 120 countries worldwide. The company has a long history with Google, which began in 2013 with Google Workspace to consolidate email clients and domains from its many global sites. On the business management side, it relies on SAP for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to handle finance, materials management, sales and distribution, warehouse operations, and more.

On-premises data center lacks robust disaster recovery capabilities

When De’ Longhi Group expanded operations into Asia in 2007, it set up an on-premises SAP instance in Hong Kong to handle everything from tracking products throughout the supply chain, to managing assets, to forecasting production. But the local data center that hosted the SAP instance lacked robust disaster recovery capabilities and eventually became obsolete.

De’ Longhi weighed its options and came up with three potential ways forward. It could either renew the hardware and continue operating its SAP in the Hong Kong data center, it could migrate its SAP system to a China-based cloud provider, or it could grow its collaboration with Google and migrate its SAP infrastructure to Google Cloud.

Modernized ERP by migrating SAP to Google Cloud

“We decided to build on our partnership with Google because we’ve had so much success with them over the past few years, and we knew they’d support our SAP migration, which is a critical project we had to get right,” said De’ Longhi Group Chief Information Officer Daniele Faccioni.

De’ Longhi Group worked with implementation partner Huware to migrate its SAP system—running on an Oracle database—to SAP HANA on Google Cloud. As a first step, the team transferred data to Cloud Storage, then set up Compute Engine as the basis for the new SAP infrastructure. For improved reliability, the Huware and De’ Longhi teams implemented two application servers in two different zones in Singapore, then they used Cloud Load Balancing for seamless scaling. They also enabled disaster recovery in Taiwan via asynchronous database replication to further improve reliability.

The result is a cloud-based system that doesn’t require technical staff to work in a data center, a modernized SAP landscape that’s ready for the latest S/4 HANA updates, and improved disaster recovery with compute spread across multiple zones.

“I measure the success of this migration by how many complaints we’ve had from staff—and there have been none,” Faccioni said. “Working with Huware, we completed the migration over a weekend, and even after a month in production I haven’t heard a single complaint. Moving our SAP environment to Google Cloud was a tremendous business decision.”

10X better availability with SAP infrastructure across two Google Cloud zones

De’ Longhi Group now has 10X better data availability, recovery time objective (RTO), and recovery point objective (RPO). In the event of an outage, the team can switch to the alternate zone with zero data loss and an RPO of less than 10 minutes. “We’ve built a very reliable network infrastructure on Google Cloud that lets us run SAP much faster than before,” said De’ Longhi Group Web System Manager Daniele de Marco.

De’ Longhi Group built on its existing partnership with PCCW Global—which it found through Partner Interconnect—to extend its Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) to Google Cloud. They chose Taiwan and Singapore as endpoints, the first one because it was the closest possible location to the production plant and the latter because it allowed them to serve the rest of the APAC market. Not only did this improve reliability, but the team also made sure the routes were consistent with where people were connecting from. For instance, those connecting from China always go through the server in Taiwan. Countries outside of APAC used an SD-WAN connection as a lower cost option to MPLS.

“All in all, this was not an easy project,” said De’ Longhi Group Technology Manager Walter Frasson. “We had an Italian team, servers in Taiwan and Singapore, and our production facility in mainland China. But we have such a strong partnership with Google, we were able to continue delivering an excellent product to our customers and facilitate a smooth migration.”

Unlocked new marketing use cases by combining SAP data with customer feedback

With SAP HANA on Google Cloud, De’ Longhi Group can more easily tap into its ERP data and connect it to other applications. Currently the team uses BigQuery to house customer support data, which they can now combine with SAP data and use SAP Analytics Cloud to support marketing efforts. Feedback and reviews from customers are connected to information such as purchase orders to provide a fuller picture of the buying journey.

“Now that we’re running SAP HANA on Google Cloud, it’s easier to align our ERP data with customer datasets in BigQuery,” Faccioni said. “We’re able to track customer behavior, see their buying patterns, and understand their preferred brands to help our marketing team target their campaigns.”