Full Report
Imagine the challenge of supply chain planning and meeting changing consumer needs when you have products that can take up to one-hundred years to produce. That’s the case for Rémy Cointreau, a family-owned maker of fine spirits whose roots go back to 1724. With rapidly evolving consumer expectations and heavy competition from premium beverage brands, Rémy Cointreau set out on a strategy to put the customer at the center of their business. Offering more than a premium beverage, key brands such as Rémy Martin cognac, Louis XIII cognac, Cointreau and St-Rémy brandy instead would offer customers a taste of luxury. “The idea is not to simply sell Cognac,” explains Sebastien Huet, the company’s CTO. “We want to sell a French way of living. For that, we needed to shift from selling products to selling an experience.”To make this a reality, Rémy Cointreau realized all elements of its business would need to be more agile. It needed more flexibility in its SAP systems, which drive Finance, Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and easy access to valuable SAP system data for business decision making and innovative customer approaches. As a result, Rémy Cointreau determined they’d need to move to the cloud to enable such a transformation. First, Rémy Cointreau elicited the help of long-time partner oXya. The Rémy Cointreau/oXya collaboration dates back 10 years, including the move of the on-prem SAP environment to oXya where they provided managed services. oXya deeply understood the pain points of Rémy Cointreau’s SAP landscape and worked with the company to capture and translate their business and functional requirements, followed by benchmarking various cloud solutions. Rémy Cointreau’s business was spread over two SAP landscapes, with interface and data consistency challenges, which needed to be unified to one SAP system and migrated to S/4HANA. Choosing the right cloud platform was critical to drive the SAP environment to deliver more value. “Scalability, flexibility and cost savings were important to Rémy Cointreau but also they had a strong desire to focus on data aspects beyond SAP,” says Matthieu Petitprez, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, oXya, a Hitachi Group Company. “Google Cloud, with its specific data analysis and management tools, completely met this objective. It allows integration of SAP with BigQuery and artificial intelligence services, bringing more value to the SAP solution.” “Just as it takes years to create a great cognac, we value partners who will be by our side for a long time,” says Huet, noting that it’s not unusual for the company to enter into 30- or 40-year agreements with suppliers. “The strategic alliance between Google Cloud and SAP made us confident they were the right choice for us. Google Cloud has a more comprehensive strategic partnership with SAP than its competitors and is clearly adding value to SAP.” Although the pandemic forced them to drive the migration remotely, Rémy Cointreau, oXya and Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) collaborated to achieve the European operations go-live in April 2020. “I was worried that COVID-19 would delay our launch, but migration was fast, easy, and on-schedule,” says Mr. Huet. “The technology played a part, but it also helped that we had two partners who we believed in.” Improved manufacturing and service with business agilityThe SAP S/4HANA deployment on Google Cloud Platform is now live for Rémy Cointreau’s Europe based operations. In addition to S/4, it also migrated the SAP supply chain planning tool, Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), as well as SAP’s Business Warehouse to Google Cloud. Similar deployments will launch soon globally. While the environment is still new, Rémy Cointreau already sees big steps towards greater agility with Google Cloud. For instance, Google Cloud makes it much faster and easier to adjust the technical operating environment. If a team wants to start performing a new resource-heavy analysis, Rémy Cointreau can expand capacity to meet demands within minutes. The team can also roll back capacity so that it is only using the resources it needs.This newfound agility takes the pressure off the IT team when it comes to provisioning a new implementation for future capacity. Rather than try to build capacity for potential peaks, the team can deploy for expected demand, then easily adjust afterward to compensate for actual loads. “It makes capacity planning so much easier,” Mr. Huet says. “Not long after go-live, we had to perform some updates—increasing memory and so on,” he recalls. “In the past, the process would take about a month to do. Now it takes a few minutes. We literally went from five weeks to five minutes. This is a tremendous improvement.” Another critical factor in Rémy Cointreau’s decision to move to Google Cloud was the ability to connect its SAP backbone to key SaaS applications such as Salesforce. As the company began to put more focus on the customer experience, creating strong, long-term relationships with customers would be essential. By being able to create this 360 degree view of data among SAP, Salesforce, and its ecommerce platform, Rémy Cointreau can more easily create personalized experiences for its customers that simply weren’t possible before.A data-driven futureRémy Cointreau business users are already reaping benefits from the cloud deployment. “One of the key improvements is the ability to analyze live data,” Huet says. “That was not the case in the past. Previously, there was a 24-hour lag between the time the data came in and the moment it could be analyzed. This is especially important on the production-management side, where every hour counts.” As exciting as the improvements in agility and connectivity have been so far, Huet sees even more possibilities for the future. “Right now, we’re focused on establishing SAP in the Google Cloud environment,” he says. “But once that’s done, we’ll be looking at technologies like BigQuery that can take our data analysis to the next level.” Potential areas of interest include product traceability and customer experience. “Now that we’re fully deployed on Google Cloud Platform, anything is possible,” he notes. “We can pull data in from multiple sources via integration and analyze it in a matter of days. We don’t need a three-month project to see value.” It is this agility and creativity that makes Huet most optimistic about the company’s partnership with Google Cloud. As he notes, “I think the best is yet to come.” To learn more about Rémy Cointreau’s deployment of SAP on Google Cloud, read the case study here. Also learn more about oXya’s capabilities with Google Cloud for SAP customers. Related Article SAP on Google Cloud: 2 analyst studies reveal quantifiable business benefits and ROI From uptime and infrastructure to efficiency and productivity—both Forrester and IDC identified major benefits to companies that have mad... Read Article
Analysis Summary
# Industry News: Luxury Spirits Giant Rémy Cointreau Migrates SAP to Google Cloud for Customer Experience Transformation
## Summary
Luxury spirits producer Rémy Cointreau migrated its core SAP systems, including S/4HANA, to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to enable a significant business pivot from selling premium products to delivering personalized customer experiences. This move, executed with partner oXya, delivered immediate gains in IT agility, drastically reducing capacity adjustment times from weeks to minutes, and sets the stage for advanced data analytics integration with tools like BigQuery.
## Key Details
- Date: European operations go-live in April 2020.
- Companies Involved: Rémy Cointreau, Google Cloud, oXya (a Hitachi Group Company).
- Category: Cloud Migration / Digital Transformation (SAP S/4HANA).
## The Story
Facing evolving consumer demands and stiff competition, Rémy Cointreau is transforming its business strategy to focus on selling luxury *experiences* rather than just spirits like Rémy Martin and Louis XIII. This required transforming their business agility, which was hampered by legacy, dual-landscape SAP environments. They selected Google Cloud, in partnership with long-term managed services provider oXya, to host a unified SAP S/4HANA environment, along with SAP APO and Business Warehouse. A key differentiator in the selection of GCP was its explicit strength in data management and AI integration (specifically BigQuery), aligning with the company's desire to gain deeper insights beyond traditional SAP reporting. The migration, undertaken remotely due to the pandemic, was completed on schedule.
## Business Impact
### For the Companies Involved
- **Rémy Cointreau:** Achieved substantial operational agility, enabling near real-time scaling of IT resources and instantaneous capacity adjustments. Key benefits include unifying disparate SAP landscapes, achieving real-time data analysis (eliminating a previous 24-hour lag), and creating pathways for deep, integrated customer views (SAP + Salesforce + e-commerce).
- **Google Cloud:** Secured a high-profile SAP win in the luxury CPG sector, demonstrating the capability of its platform to handle complex, mission-critical workloads while excelling in adjacent data services (BigQuery).
- **oXya:** Reinforced its strategic role as an integrator and managed service provider for complex SAP migrations to GCP, leveraging its decade-long relationship with the client.
### For Competitors
Competitors in the premium spirits market (e.g., LVMH, Diageo) are put under pressure to accelerate their own digital transformations. In an industry where product quality takes decades to mature, digital agility and personalized customer engagement become crucial differentiators accessible only through modern cloud infrastructure.
### For Customers
End consumers stand to benefit from more personalized and seamless experiences, enabled by connecting transactional data (SAP) with relationship data (Salesforce). The improved manufacturing efficiency could also smoother inventory and availability of high-demand products.
### For the Market
This migration serves as a strong reference case illustrating the value proposition of GCP specifically for SAP deployments, emphasizing data extensibility (BigQuery integration) as a primary driver beyond standard infrastructure cost savings, validating the broader trend toward specialized cloud services integrated with ERP cores.
## Technical Implications
The deployment runs SAP S/4HANA and related tools on GCP, unifying two prior SAP landscapes into one instance. The technology directly enables:
1. **Elasticity:** Reducing capacity provisioning/adjustment time from weeks to minutes.
2. **Real-time Analytics:** Eliminating data latency between transaction systems and analytical platforms.
3. **Data Extensibility:** Seamlessly integrating SAP data with Google's data lake (BigQuery) and AI/ML services for advanced applications like product traceability.
## Strategic Analysis
- **Market Positioning:** Rémy Cointreau is positioning itself as a digitally nimble purveyor of luxury *lifestyle*, contrasting with legacy competitors perceived as slower to adapt.
- **Competitive Advantage:** The primary advantage lies in the enhanced speed of insight and execution. The ability to pull multi-source data for rapid analysis (days instead of months) allows for faster course correction in volatile markets.
- **Challenges:** The strategic success hinges on the actual implementation of planned data projects (traceability, personalized experience). Integration complexity post-go-live with external SaaS (like Salesforce) remains a critical area for ongoing governance.
## Industry Reactions
The article itself frames the migration positively, highlighting the confidence in the strategic alignment between Google Cloud and SAP as a partnership differentiator against other hyperscalers. The successful remote migration during the pandemic also suggests robust partnership execution capabilities.
## Future Outlook
The focus will shift from migration stabilization to leveraging advanced data capabilities. Key areas to watch include how Rémy Cointreau operationalizes BigQuery for granular product traceability and builds out its 360-degree customer view to deliver truly differentiated "French way of living" experiences.
## For Security Professionals
While the article focuses on agility, the migration of mission-critical SAP workloads to GCP necessitates rigorous security reviews. Key considerations include:
1. **Data Governance:** Ensuring BigQuery integration maintains appropriate access controls across combined SAP and external data sets.
2. **Identity and Access Management (IAM):** Establishing unified and least-privilege access across the new cloud environment, especially concerning sensitive financial and supply chain data now running in S/4HANA.
3. **Third-Party Risk:** Managing the expanded attack surface introduced by integrating core ERP systems with operational technologies and external SaaS platforms like Salesforce.