Business challenge

Competition is fierce in the saturated food and drinks industry. To challenge global giants and established brands, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. looks to innovate and respond fast to market developments.

Transformation

Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. transformed business agility and scalability, working with IBM and local partner Digi-InfoFabrica to migrate its mission-critical SAP ERP applications to the IBM Cloud™.

Results

43%

lower TCO over 5 years

30x

faster performance for mission-critical SAP applications

Boosts

business agility, facilitating expansion into new markets

Business challenge story

Reaching boiling point

Vietnam is one of the world’s largest coffee producers, exporting 1.8 million tons of green beans a year. From its humble origins in the country’s Dak Lak Province, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. has grown to become Vietnam’s number-one coffee brand. Its products are sold in 80 countries and territories worldwide, including China, US, UK, Canada, Korea, Japan, Russia, France, Germany and Dubai.

But Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. has an unquenchable thirst for further growth, even though the sector is heavily saturated, and competition from multinational corporations is fierce. To challenge established global brands, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. wanted to modernize its business processes and systems to increase agility, foster innovation and support growth.

Operational flexibility was a key concern for Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. The Group recognized that it must be able to respond rapidly to new market conditions, regulations and priorities.

Previously, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. ran its mission-critical SAP ERP applications—covering production, supply chain, distribution, sales, finance and more—using on-premises infrastructure.

Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. wants to share Vietnam’s unique coffee culture with the rest of the world. The Group’s goal is to become a truly global coffee brand to rival the leading players in the industry.

But Trung Nguyên Legend Corp’s existing IT set-up was threatening to hold it back. The Group looked to move away from a rigid on-premises infrastructure to a much more flexible cloud model.

Transformation story

Energizing IT

After establishing that cloud computing was the right way forward, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. sent out a request for proposal and considered offerings from several cloud vendors. After an extensive evaluation period, the Group selected IBM Services for Managed SAP Applications.

Managed SAP Applications ticked all the boxes in terms of availability, performance and security. Most important, however, was the fact that IBM offered fully managed services. Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. wanted to reduce the burden on its IT team so that they could focus their time and efforts on the business, making Managed SAP Applications the ideal solution.

As well as hosting Trung Nguyên Legend Corp’s SAP applications in its Singapore data center, IBM also takes care of the day-to-day application management and maintenance. IBM’s long-standing partnership with SAP and deep expertise in working with SAP solutions was therefore a key deciding factor for Trung Nguyên Legend Corp.

Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. felt that IBM were the safest pair of hands and knew that it could trust IBM to support its most critical business applications. As part of its modernization drive, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. took the opportunity to migrate its SAP ERP applications to the SAP HANA® database to increase performance and power faster analytics. The Group relied on support from IBM and local SAP partner Digi-InfoFabrica to support its migration to the SAP HANA platform, before moving the entire SAP landscape from its on-premises environment to the IBM Cloud.

The migration to the cloud went very smoothly. Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. found the support from the IBM team to be excellent, which helped the Group to complete the project on time and on-budget.

Results story

Giving performance a caffeine boost

With business processes now running in the cloud, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. has unlocked the operational flexibility it needs to support its ambitious expansion plans.

With Managed SAP Applications, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. can scale capacity up and down whenever required—enabling the Group to enter new markets, meet business demands and adapt to constantly changing market conditions with ease. If Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. needs to scale its SAP ERP landscape, IBM will help them do this quickly and conveniently.

The beauty of Managed SAP Applications is that Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. no longer needs to think about infrastructure at all. IBM takes care of everything. Not only does this save a great deal of time and effort, it has also significantly reduced costs as the Group no longer needs to buy and maintain hardware. Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. estimates that, over a five-year period, it will reduce the total cost of ownership by 43 percent.

Since moving to SAP HANA on Managed SAP Applications, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. has also seen a huge boost in performance. SAP applications are now running up to 30 times faster than they did before and reports are available much faster too, enabling employees to work more productively.

Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. has received very positive feedback from employees since it moved to Managed SAP Applications. The dramatic performance improvement has significantly reduced loading times and gives employees much faster access to the information they need to get on with their work.

Crucially, the move from on-premises IT to Managed SAP Applications is a major step in Trung Nguyên Legend Corp’s journey to becoming a lean, agile, digitally-driven enterprise and one of the world’s leading coffee brands.

Supported by IBM and SAP, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. is already looking at augmenting its SAP landscape with big data analytics, artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies to support innovative new e-commerce and omni-channel marketing efforts.

With Managed SAP Applications, the sky’s the limit for Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. Supported by IBM and SAP, the Group is very confident that it can make its global expansion goals a reality.

A mandala-style logo which contains representations of the sun, a love heart and the taijitu sits above the text: "Trung Nguyên Legend The Energy Coffee That Changes Life The No.1 Coffee!"

Trung Nguyên Legend Corp.

The leading Vietnamese coffee brand, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. produces, processes and sells its coffee products in more than 80 countries and territories. Its products include G7, the #1 instant coffee in Vietnam and a beloved brand all over the world, Trung Nguyên Legend café sữa đá (iced coffee with milk), Special Edition, Classic and the first and only oxygen-tight, biodegradable coffee capsules in the world. The Group also operates more than 10,000 coffee shops in Vietnam. Headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, Trung Nguyên Legend Corp. employs over 5,000 people.

Solution components

Take the next step

To learn more about IBM Services for Managed SAP Applications, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/cloud/sap/managed

View more client stories or learn more about IBM Services

Digi-InfoFabrica is a leading IT consultancy specialized in cloud computing. Its team of highly skilled consultants works closely with clients to help them make the move to the cloud. Headquartered in Singapore, the company operates across South East Asia. To learn more about products and services from Digi-InfoFabrica, visit: dgiff.com

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