Peeling the SAP onion – how Vistaprint got more agile with iterative deployment
E-commerce specialist Vistaprint has adopted a pioneering approach to SAP that’s allowing it to increase the speed of the deployment cycle and to support fresh business innovation.
Vistaprint replaced its on-premises ECC installation of SAP with a Fiori-based S/4HANA platform that’s hosted on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud during 2020. The company, which produces bespoke products for its clients, has used Basis Technologies’ ActiveControl product to create an Agile and automated approach that’s improving the production deployment processes. Mukul Agrawal, Director of Technology at Vistaprint, explains:
The combination has increased the speed of projects and the time to market, and it’s helped with risk-mitigation processes. A lot of business users don’t even know we use ActiveControl because it’s all happening in the background. So, it’s invisible, but it plays a big role in change management across our SAP landscape.
Vistaprint uses SAP across a range of core functions. Three years ago, the company needed more flexibility, as the older version of its SAP platform couldn’t run timely reports on large volumes of data. Agrawal says:
Our order values are small, but we have to deal with high order volumes – and that leads to high data volumes. With older systems, you just cannot get the reports that users need on a real-time basis.
The company was keen to make the shift to cloud-based SAP to take advantage of newer functionality. An additional factor was the total cost of ownership, with Vistaprint wanting to reduce the amount of SAP platforms it was supporting:
Instead of having five different systems we were able to consolidate. So, we could retire some of the systems that we didn’t need.
Taking an iterative approach
As Vistaprint started on this digital transformation process, ActiveControl played a significant role in accelerating the S/4HANA project by automating manually intensive processes. With ActiveControl technology, Vistaprint has moved from a three-week production deployment cycle to a daily production cycle. Agrawal says:
We deploy changes to production every weekday morning. ActiveControl gives our developers, configurators and technical-engineering teams the confidence they need to deploy successfully without impacting production capabilities.
With the ActiveControl toolset pushing out changes to users faster, the result is a more Agile and iterative approach to deployment, which is not something that is necessarily associated to large-scale SAP implementations. According to Agrawal:
We can we fully upgrade the SAP system in three-and-a-half months. The industry benchmark right now is about 12 months. And we have broken those benchmarks because of these tools. ActiveControl gives us the ability to move faster, mitigates the risks, and puts the control in the hands of the developers.
Vistaprint has a long-standing commitment to Agile development techniques. While the company used iteration to help manage its older version of SAP, the move to cloud-based SAP gave the initiative new impetus with the potential to use ActiveControl. Agrawal argues Vistaprint’s success shows it’s possible to take an iterative approach to SAP deployment:
It depends on how you approach the problem. You can get the flexibility – you need to have the right process, the right team members and the right control. If you get the right combination, you can make Agile work in SAP.
Reaping the benefits
Agrawal points to three plus points from ActiveControl. First, as mentioned earlier, the time to market for deployment changes has improved significantly. Second, the speed of projects has also improved, as ActiveControl gives developers and engineers the capability to move faster. Third, he points to more effective risk mitigation and audit controls:
Now, we have the right balance. We don’t need a lot of customisations. ActiveControl enforces control based on the configuration that we set up in the toolset.
Proposing daily deployments to production was a big call that originally perplexed a lot of people at Vistaprint. Agrawal’s team worked with Basis Technologies to show how its toolset provided a good fit with Vistaprint’s corporate culture:
When people understood how we were going to put the right controls in place, they were willing to experiment. In Vistaprint, the culture of experimentation is in our DNA. And that experimentation meant when everyone saw the benefits after the first increment, they were like, ‘Yeah, let’s just go forward. We like it’.
He adds that the infrastructure team could also see that the automation within ActiveControl meant they were not just manually pressing buttons every day to push new changes to production:
Automation has helped everyone to increase their day-to-day tasks as it’s giving people time to focus on higher-value work instead of mundane tasks. With a lot of these capabilities, when people see they’re not doing the nitty-gritty tasks every day, that benefit helps with change management as well.
Agrawal’s team continues to work closely with Basis Technologies to think about how potential now features could be used by Vistaprint:
We provide regular input to product management about the features that will help us as a customer and that feedback is taken into consideration. I have often seen our feedback accounted for in the next product release. I want to continue to reap the benefits of our multi-year partnership.
His advice for other business and digital leaders who are thinking about using a technology such as ActiveControl to enable an automated approach to SAP is to set clear objectives:
Nothing is impossible. You just have to peel the onion, figure out where the problems are, and be clear about what you want to drive and change. Focus on what you’re going to accomplish and then find the right tool set that’s going to help you accomplish your target at a reasonable price.
