Ferrara Candy Case Study
2015
Ferrara Candy Company, founded in 1908 and headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, is the third largest confectionery company in the United States. The company is a $1 billion, full-line candy company, producing gummies, fruit chews, fruit snacks, hard candy, and liquid-filled candies across a deep portfolio of well-loved brands, including Trolli®, Brachs®, Black Forest®, Red Hots®, Now & Later®, and Lemonhead®. Ferrara partners with prominent retailers across all classes of trade, providing leading quality, service, and consumer-informed innovation. The company currently has six domestic and international manufacturing facilities that feature state-of-the-art manufacturing capabilities and unique scale, and Ferrara continues to invest in its infrastructure to meet changes in consumer tastes and preferences. In 2015, the company entered the rapidly growing organic and vitamin gummy markets, further enhancing Ferrara’s market momentum and growth trajectory.
Running SAP BusinessObjects on HANA in AWS enables unparalleled agility for reports and analytics across our business. This solution empowers our business with a streamlined analytical process for making strategic, tactical, and operational decisions."
Mustafa Mustafa
IT Director, BI & App Development, Ferrara Candy Company
The Challenge
- A merger of Ferrara Pan Candy with Farley’s & Sathers created a disruptive and incoherent analytical environment.
- Existing solutions could not deliver timely, actionable business insight.
- Ferrara required a solution where costs scaled in relation to realized value.
Why Amazon Web Services
- AWS Consulting Partner, Protera Technologies, teamed with Ferrara to build an SAP BusinessObjects on HANA analytics environment using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
- Ferrara is now running in full production.
- This environment is comprised of nine Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for SAP Applications (BOBJ/SLT), BusinessObjects, HANA database, and more.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is leveraged to store EBS snapshots.
The Benefits
- SAP BusinessObjects on HANA running in AWS delivers a coherent, stable reporting and analytics platform.
- Delivery times have been reduced from weeks to minutes and from hours to seconds.
- Costs scale with the footprint, in step with delivered value.
- Finance, sales, and operations teams have access to full data sets and the ability to analyze on demand.
About Ferrara Candy Company
Ferrara Candy Company, founded in 1908 and headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, is the third largest confectionery company in the United States.
AWS Services Used
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Amazon VPC
Provision a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.
Amazon EC2
Secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Launch applications when needed without upfront commitments.
Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
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