Google Cloud is a key ingredient to success for Mrs. T’s Pierogies

Improved forecasting, promotion optimization and disaster recovery

Historically, sales planning and forecasting were manual, offline and time-consuming processes within Mrs. T’s. When considering ways to justify the cost of the project, Mrs. T’s sought business value through real time analytics to accelerate sales forecasting, optimize trade promotions, and improve overall company planning.

Combined together, Mrs. T’s saw Google Cloud as the best-fit platform to achieve these results.” Every manufacturer has promotions, and you’ll see them in the store: Buy one, get one free, for example,” said Coyle.

“So, we need to make sure that when we’re spending our money on a promotion with a retailer, that we are utilizing a system with analytics to predict how the promotion could perform, and how the promotion did perform. That was the type of predictive business and post event knowledge that we were looking for.”

Finally, Mrs. T’s knew that it needed to make some upgrades on the disaster recovery front.

“Disaster recovery, for the hardware platform we had, was difficult to find,” explained Coyle. “The DR plan we had was not dynamic at all. It was a cold site using tape backup. We needed to improve on that with a better DR and business continuity plan with automatic failover capability.”

The migration begins

Rackspace Technology knows that strategy, process and project management can significantly reduce the complexity and stress around migrations, which is why they broke the migration down into phases, with the first phase focused on the move from on-premise infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and updating the database to HANA.

Through a series of bi-weekly meetings and meticulous planning, Rackspace Technology was able to quickly, effectively and affordably transition Mrs. T’s from its on-premise SAP production environment to GCP. Phase one was completed on time, and on start-up, all SAP functions worked as designed.

The timeline was agreed upon by all teams and the migration officially kicked off in February of 2020 and went live in September 2020.

From ideation to production, the seven-month timeline included the following milestones:

• Unicode conversion
• Database migration to HANA
• Migration of the platform to Google Cloud
• S/4 conversion to 1809 from ECC 6.0
• FIORI implementation.

In Phase 1, we helped migrate from an on-premises IBM iSeries on a DB2 database to SAP ECC on HANA in the Google Cloud in 12 weeks. For Phase 2, we used a technical upgrade to make sure our ECC environment was ready for the final move to S4 in less than 4 months. Both phases beat SAP’s timelines and estimates.

Despite this daunting timeline, Rackspace Technology and Google Cloud helped Mrs. T’s modernize its sales forecasting capabilities and accelerate batch transactions and onscreen end-user transactions by up to 60% with minimal downtime and zero disruptions.

“During Phase I, if we hadn’t sent emails out announcing that we were migrating over the weekend, I don’t think some would have known we had done it. We came in on Monday and everything just worked,” recalled Coyle.