Camanchaca migrates to the cloud and integrates its SAP data in BigQuery

Camanchaca has 55-plus years’ experience feeding the world with healthy, nutritious seafood. With operations along the Chilean coastline and a commitment to protect its fishing grounds, it exports salmon, jack mackerel, and shellfish to over 50 countries worldwide.

In 2020, the company joined Google Cloud to begin a new chapter by facing one of its all-time main challenges: transforming the organization’s digital culture.

With over 3,500 employees and offices in Chile, Mexico, the USA, Europe, and Japan, Camanchaca now has high productivity and connectivity levels thanks to Google Cloud’s solutions.

The beginning of the journey to the cloud

Camanchaca is structured into four major divisions requiring innovation.

The first is related to salmon farming and processing, from the company’s genetic enhancement program for its own stocks and production of broodfish to achieve self-sufficiency in the supply of roe, to its presence in the largest markets for the commercialization of a wide array of salmon products.

The second division, industrial fishing, focuses on the responsible operation of fisheries and the provision of high-quality fish meal, and frozen, canned, and oil products for consumers.

The third division is dedicated to mussel and abalone farming, with operations in northern and southern Chile. And the fourth division manages a shipping and warehousing service for third parties.

In December 2020, the company began a digitalization process to provide added value to its manufacturing operations, make its products more accessible to buyers worldwide, position itself in the market, and improve the business.

In the first phase of the project, Google Workspace tools were added and more than 1,500 user accounts were migrated, resulting in an 80% adoption rate for the collaborative work tools in less than three months.

Although the pandemic did not have an impact on Camanchaca’s decision-making process, using Google Workspace improved productivity and helped it ensure its teams could keep working without losing connectivity.

First leap into the cloud: from SAP to Google Cloud

After adding Google Workspace’s office solutions, Camanchaca migrated SAP to Google Cloud. As a result, it improved its infrastructure without service downtime that could halt production and disrupt the work of its thousands of employees.

This was possible due to a quick migration process, completed in less than three months, far shorter than the usual four to six months. After this change, the company’s infrastructure’s availability rate for SAP increased from 95% to 99.9%, while its processing power increased sixfold and SAP was enabled in high availability.

In late April 2021, the company decided to go a step further and migrate to SAP S/4HANA. Supported by Google Cloud’s experts, Camanchaca was able to deploy a proof of concept in five days. After a month of testing, the company began planning the migration, which took just three months. By late 2021, the company had already migrated SAP and 30 other systems to Google Cloud.

To go even further, Camanchaca chose to add BigQuery to process large data volumes and begin building analytic models. However, they managed to accelerate that process only after adding a new tool.

Second leap: Google Cloud Cortex Framework

In February 2022, the company incorporated Google Cloud Cortex Framework, a solution for delivering business results using enriched data from SAP and other sources such as Google Trends, weather reports, and syndicated datasets.

The tool allows SAP customers to deploy data solutions faster, leverage data management best practices, and achieve business results more quickly.

Camanchaca became the first Latin American company to deploy Google Cloud Cortex Framework 2.0 for SAP, and the first company in the world to install Cortex 2.1.

Results of the deployment

Camanchaca can now leverage SAP data with other datasets in BigQuery to provide more visibility into the business, something that was not possible before. Cortex Framework provides true cloud agility to scale.

As the company had a fully centralized model before migrating, the data was not universally accessible in the organization, in particular for workers located far from urban centers with better connectivity.

With BigQuery and Looker integrated into SAP, Camanchaca tackled one of its main technical challenges: increasing its ability to manage data. Consequently, processing and analyzing the data generated by the company’s operational regions is now faster.

This new data structure helped Camanchaca solve important business issues, such as centralizing and accessing information about products, orders, and customers in real time, improve sales analytics, and increase order fulfillment.

For Pedro Aguirre, migrating to Google Cloud proved essential, not just to improve Camanchaca’s infrastructure, but also to transform the company’s business logic and priorities. "We realized we could start living in the cloud and think differently. We began to see how we could leverage the benefits of every Google Cloud service to solve our problems," says Aguirre.

This led Camanchaca into a new phase of its Google Cloud deployment, as it managed to accelerate migration processes and solution deployments.

An ever-faster change

One of Camanchaca’s cornerstones is sustainability. As a result, one major challenge for the company is becoming carbon neutral by 2025. Thanks to enterprise innovations driven by cloud technology, the company is on track to meet that goal; it currently processes more than 24 tons of green carbon every year by deploying carbon-neutral Google Cloud.

Another company goal is cutting its energy consumption in half by 2024 using cloud tools. As highlighted by Aguirre, Camanchaca is on its way to becoming more than just a "green company", but a model of how to change a corporate vision using technology to increase sustainability and become more eco-friendly.