Retail
Asia Pacific
Enterprise/Public Sector
"The business is now looking at moving more services and infrastructure into Alibaba Cloud as well as a warehouse management system as a part of its overall Cloud strategy and digital transformation to improve operational efficiency and drive innovation."
Justin Piper,
IT Manager, KB Food Co.
About KB Foods
KB Food Company is Australia’s largest seafood company operating at all levels of the supply chain including; catching, processing, manufacturing, importing, exporting and wholesaling. The company provides over 100,000 tonnes of seafood annually to leading foodservice operators and major supermarkets. In Western Australia, KB Food Co. purchases and handles around 70% of all commercial fish caught, direct from vessels to our modern facility we can produce a range of products suitable from retail to wholesale.
KB Food Co. takes the responsibility to the environment and future generations very seriously and has a commitment to promoting sustainable and environmentally friendly, ecologically sound practices. The operating brands include, KB Seafood Co, Just Caught Frozen Seafood, KB’s, and By George. The business is one of the most awarded and successful food service operators in Australia and the largest privately-owned operator of Western Rock Lobster.
Challenge
KB Food Co. have a large ERP environment helping to run a diverse and complex business. A key decision for this implementation was to look at how the ERP system was going to support the business into the future. A previous Microsoft Dynamics environment was reviewed on the basis of alignment with the broader business strategy and alternative solutions were looked at as part of the project.
SAP S/4 HANA was a shortlisted offering as it ticked a number of boxes for the business: Align into the business ERP strategy for future, integration with HQ policies and a scalable offering to allow for growth. KB Food Co. reviewed a number of Cloud Providers with proven capabilities in SAP implementations.
Why Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud demonstrated the greatest overall advantage across 3 key criteria throughout the entire process from evaluation to implementation. Firstly, being one of SAP’s strategic partners, Alibaba Cloud provides SAP certified cloud infrastructure in Australia with high performance and reliability to host SAP S/4 HANA.
Secondly, Alibaba Cloud has built a very robust ecosystem based around SAP, with a dedicated team of experts and high engagement from Alibaba Cloud’s consulting partner Ernst & Young who were involved in all stages of the SAP deployment.
Lastly, the long-term cost of hosting SAP on Alibaba Cloud was thoroughly analyzed and proven to be more cost effective when comparing with other hyperscale cloud providers.
Another value-add Alibaba Cloud has delivered for this project is the ability to accelerate the network connection between KB Food Co. offices in Australia and China. By leveraging a Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN), Alibaba Cloud has been able to deliver enhanced connectivity via leveraging private networks across multiple sites, and addressed operating within compliance rules for the regulatory requirements in China.
A critical factor of implementation success was the network. As Australia's borders have been closed during the pandemic and the implementation team were based in China, being able to carry out the successful project relied on the performance and reliability of the network. The team managed to implement and go-live with the ERP system thanks to a solid and fast private network connection.
This secure network connection has enabled the project team of KB Food Co., Ernst & Young and Alibaba Cloud to successfully manage a range of elements remotely including communication, configuration, testing, tuning and training.
Architecture
KB Food Co. takes advantage of the following services and solutions provided by Alibaba Cloud:- SAP S/4 HANA on Alibaba Cloud
- High availability cloud architecture
-Large machines and components supporting HA design, marketplace image
- Consulting service to help deploy SAP on cloud
Looking Forward
The business is now looking at moving more services and infrastructure into Alibaba Cloud as well as a warehouse management system as a part of its overall Cloud strategy and digital transformation to improve operational efficiency and drive innovation.
Featured
Products
Products
Elastic and secure virtual cloud servers to cater all your cloud hosting needs.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is a bundle of software and services that addresses the specific needs of SAP users. It is the only operating system that is optimized for all SAP software solutions.
A global network for rapidly building a distributed business system and hybrid cloud to help users create a network with enterprise level-scalability and the communication capabilities of a cloud network
Other Related Story
Century Mart
Century Mart (Shiji Lianhua) is a supermarket chain with over 170 branch stores across China.
WEMART
UAE-based WEMART is one of the largest Asian supermarket chains in the Middle East.
Snapshot
Alibaba Cloud helped KB Food Co. to better manage its complex ERP environment through our SAP certified cloud infrastructure and secure, global network coverage.
Product/Solution Used
Product/Solution Used
A Free Trial That Lets You Build Big!
Start building with 50+ products and up to 12 months usage for Elastic Compute Service
Get Started for Free Get Started for Free
