PICK N PAY milliseconds ,” adds Heneke . “ Especially if the device is very chatty ; multiple roundtrips between the server and scanner can add up to seconds in wait time .”
Ultimately , the solution was for AWS to create a data centre in Cape Town , allowing the smooth running of those crucial systems .
Heneke continues : “ The question would be , ‘ why don ' t you just do everything in Cape Town ?’.
“ It ’ s quite interesting that South Africanhosted data centres are about 15 % more expensive than the European ones . There ’ s probably a myriad of reasons for it , but I believe it ’ s because electricity is more expensive down here .”
A move worth making Asked about the benefits of moving Pick n Pay ’ s IT infrastructure across to the cloud , Heneke can ’ t help but bring up an anecdote from a SAP conference he attended a couple of years ago .
“ We were standing around and I said to this group of people , ‘ Hey , we actually intend to go to the cloud with our whole environment ’ – and I was made out to be mad ,” he recalls .
While this story is told in modest fashion , there must surely be a hint of ‘ I told you so ’ in Heneke ’ s mind ? In practice , the move has been a “ real success story ”, allowing Pick n Pay to reduce its infrastructure , operating , and support costs by an enormous 40 %.
Another huge bonus provided by the cloud is the ability to easily scale up and scale down its systems . For years , the company ’ s main system was a non-Unicode SAP database – and , to progress to newer versions , Unicode encoding was required .
This meant exporting the 20TB database , a sizeable and expensive task given the need to double up on hardware . “ With the cloud ,” says Heneke , “ we could just ramp up during the project , do the Unicode conversion , then scale down and all is well .
“ For us , the flexibility that the cloud has given us has been phenomenal .”
What next for Pick n Pay ? The global retail market , in Heneke ’ s words , is in “ quite a difficult place ”.
From an IT point-of-view , however , the goal for Pick n Pay is to automate old support office processes through RPA and further invest in singular access across all of its platforms .
A digitalisation of the commercial function within the clothing business – to be led by American firm Blue Yonder – is also on the horizon , while SAP has requested that its clients move to the
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