Retail and wholesale company, The Coop Switzerland, operates supermarkets, department stores, restaurants, pharmacies, and gas station and convenience stores across the nation, with 2.5 million members and 95,000 employees.
Its online stores enable customers to order products directly to their homes and the wider Coop Group additionally includes other online stores for DIY, furniture, electronics, perfumeries, and watch and jewelry stores. All-in-all revenues for the firm for 2023 reached CHF 34.7bn.
Having completed a successful initial migration to SAP S/4HANA in 2020, Coop Switzerland was next needing to start the second phase of its shift. This included upgrading to SAP S/4HANA 2022 and taking two substantial SAP systems – a CTC trading system (one terabyte) and a CCR retail system (eight terabytes) to the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
Critical for Coop’s operations, these systems generate approximately CHF 16bn revenue annually, almost half of Coop’s total revenue. The aim was to achieve minimal downtime and maximal operational continuity.
An SNP bridge to SAP migration for Coop Switzerland
Coop Switzerland partnered with SNP to assist with the migration project, and leveraged SNP’s CrystalBridge Transformation software to migrate the systems and SNP Validate for data testing and validation. The aim was to achieve minimal downtime and maximal operational continuity.
Given the combined nine-terabyte size of the systems, extensive testing and validation were required, with three test cycles completed before go-live. SNP made vital tweaks and improvements following each of these cycles to help ensure a straightforward and error-free transition.
The entire project spanned 11 months, and a tight 18-hour window of downtime was granted to complete the migration of both systems in May this year. However, with SNP’s expertise and tools, not only was the migration smooth and accurate but the downtime finished eight hours ahead of time, completing in just ten hours altogether.
The SAP migration project was no doubt a challenge, but thanks to Coop’s partnership with SNP, the process was able to be “effortless” for Coop.
Stefan Gempp, head of IT marketing and purchasing at Coop said: “SNP exceeded our expectations by completing the migration of our SAP systems to the cloud in just ten hours, well ahead of the planned downtime. The entire process went smoothly, allowing us to seamlessly continue our operations with enhanced performance and reliability.”
