Case Study: Sumitomo Chemical achieves 40% faster SAP batch processing and stronger disaster recovery with Amazon Web Services

Sumitomo Chemical - Customer Case Study

Sumitomo Chemical, a century‑old Japanese chemical manufacturer with global R&D, manufacturing and business units, relied on a large SAP ERP backbone (SAPS >200,000 and ~5,700 users in Japan). To meet goals for digitalization, stronger cybersecurity, faster M&A-driven scaling and more robust disaster recovery, the IT team needed a flexible, secure, globally distributed infrastructure to replace costly, inflexible on‑premises servers that struggled with heavy batch workloads.

They migrated their SAP ERP to AWS (migrating the main Japanese instance in December 2016 using log‑shipping and expanded Direct Connect) and began deploying SAP S/4HANA on an AWS global template, using services such as EC2/AMI, S3, IAM, KMS and CloudWatch with Professional Services and TAM support. The move cut batch job processing time by about 40% on slightly smaller specs, enabled cross‑region disaster recovery, lowered running costs, accelerated global rollout and helped the IT organization adopt a cloud‑first, more innovative operating model.

Sumitomo Chemical

Yasuo Tosa

Associate Officer, IT Innovation Dept.