ABOUT NEOLITH

Neolith is a pioneer in the creation of sintered stone, a revolutionary and innovative architectural surface, with superior technical characteristics made from 100% natural raw materials. They have a commercial presence in more than 100 countries and achieved carbon neutrality in 2019. They are leading the transformation of the surfacing industry by providing innovative and sustainable solutions that combine design and functionality for a wide range of applications; from kitchens, bathrooms, and high-design furniture, to facades and coverings for the most avant-garde architecture.

KEEPING PACE WITH RAPID GLOBAL EXPANSION

Neolith is currently immersed in an expansion plan in key geographic areas such as North America, Europe, China, and Australia. In order to further boost its international expansion and continue its organic growth, Neolith needed to implement SAP’s ERP solution on a global scale. This would allow the employees of all its subsidiaries to settle operations in a harmonized way, while simultaneously optimizing their processes and setting the foundation for even more growth in the future.

In addition to SAP’s ERP solution, Neolith wanted to install BW/4HANA, the next-generation business data warehousing solution based on SAP S/4HANA, to facilitate information gathering and data analysis from a single reliable source. This would help improve and streamline data-driven decision-making in the company.

USING THE AWS CLOUD AS A FLEXIBLE TOOL FOR EXPANSION

Zoi recommended that the SAP systems reside in the AWS Cloud which would act as the central point of the network to facilitate access for its international subsidiaries.

The cloud presents the perfect tool for global expansion as it is globally available and easily scalable to meet the demands of even the biggest and fastest-growing companies without the hassle of increasing and maintaining internal infrastructure.

For the next phase of the project, high availability for the S/4HANA and BW/4HANA production environments will be installed and tested. This will provide the resiliency Neolith requires for its most important applications by having a Disaster Recovery system with a very low Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective.

EVENT SOURCING AS THE BASIS FOR ERROR AND DATA ANALYSIS

The proposed implementation included two main phases: 

1. Setting up the cloud infrastructure in AWS 
2. Proceeding with SAP installation (basis) of S/4HANA and BW/4HANA 

After the cloud infrastructure was set up, development and test environments were created, followed by the functional configuration of the systems and finally, the production environment was deployed. The creation of the cloud infrastructure and deployment of the development, test, and production environments took 3 weeks to complete.

To accelerate the deployment of the SAP systems on AWS, Zoi created a custom AWS SAP QuickStart cloud formation adjusted to the requirements of Neolith, which allowed SAP to be installed in a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months. In addition to SAP ERP and BW/4HANA, SAP Solution Manager, a centralized SAP application management platform, was also installed. The architecture of the final solution can be seen in the figure below. 

THE SIZE SAP INSTALLATION ON AWS BY ZOI

1. We will use one HANA, and two tenants for DEV and QA systems to minimize the administration and costs.
2. We are using auto-scaling to always have a copy of the SAP application server.
3. HANA Studio (bastion) and SAP Router are always available thanks to the auto-scaling group.
4. CT2 (Cloud Time Table) is our scheduler solution to start and stop servers through a website.
5. Site-2-Site VPN to connect with the customer’s data center.
   

AWS Cloud architecture diagram created for Neolith.