Since 1999, Shut­ter­fly has been empow­er­ing cus­tomers to cre­ate prod­ucts and cap­ture moments that reflect who they unique­ly are. Acquired in 2019 by Apol­lo Glob­al Man­age­ment, the cur­rent Shut­ter­fly fam­i­ly of brands — orga­nized into three divi­sions: Con­sumer (Spoon­flower, Snap­fish, and Shut­ter­fly), Life­touch, and Shut­ter­fly Busi­ness Solu­tions — forms the lead­ing e‑commerce and man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­form for per­son­al­ized prod­ucts and cus­tom design.

Enabling mass per­son­al­iza­tion for mil­lions of cus­tomers is no easy task, espe­cial­ly amid the social dis­tanc­ing, sup­ply chain, and e‑commerce dis­rup­tions we have all expe­ri­enced in recent years. In addi­tion, uni­fy­ing the busi­ness prac­tices and tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms inher­it­ed through mul­ti­ple acqui­si­tions in recent years had also posed chal­lenges for the company.

Shut­ter­fly has been swift in imple­ment­ing a range of SAP prod­ucts, becom­ing a pio­neer in cloud-first tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion. ​“We have brought every­one togeth­er onto a sin­gle SAP plat­form,” said Andres Suarez, Senior Direc­tor for Enter­prise Appli­ca­tions at Shut­ter­fly, who recent­ly sat down with ASUG to dis­cuss the company’s trans­for­ma­tion story.

A Com­plex Consolidation

Encom­pass­ing SAP solu­tions such as S/4HANA, Suc­cess­Fac­tors (Employ­ee Cen­tral & Pay­roll), Ari­ba, Extend­ed Ware­house Man­age­ment, Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning, Con­cur Trav­el & Expense Man­age­ment, Black­Line Solu­tions for, Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form, and Gov­er­nance, Risk & Com­pli­ance, Shutterfly’s tech­nol­o­gy ecosys­tem also incor­po­rates SAP part­ner­ships such as Open­Text Ven­dor Invoice Man­age­ment (VIM) and Open­Text Extend­ed Enter­prise Con­tent Man­age­ment (xECM). 

“We’ve migrat­ed from Work­day, Law­son, Ora­cle EBS, Epi­cor, and Net­Suite to SAP, and that has enabled impor­tant syn­er­gies for our com­pa­ny,” said Suarez. ​“Beyond the tech­nol­o­gy aspect, it has dri­ven align­ment and orga­ni­za­tion­al change.”

The past few years have involved mul­ti­ple plat­form con­sol­i­da­tions across the com­pa­ny. Shut­ter­fly CIO Michael Robin­son calls it ​“sim­pli­fy­ing the quilt,” a key pil­lar in Shutterfly’s tech­nol­o­gy strat­e­gy to build a foun­da­tion for scale. The effort also entails dep­re­cat­ing lega­cy sys­tems and migrat­ing his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments for retention. 

“The val­ue is not just in the prod­uct func­tion­al­i­ty, but in the syn­er­gies we’ve achieved,” said Suarez. ​“Employ­ee Cen­tral is now our HR sys­tem of record. It gives us vis­i­bil­i­ty to all employ­ee data that we didn’t have before, and we pay between 12,000 and 19,000 per­ma­nent plus sea­son­al employ­ees from Employ­ee Cen­tral Payroll.”

“Shut­ter­fly also uses SAP Pro­cure­ment, Extend­ed Ware­house Man­age­ment and Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning,” Suarez added. ​“Our oper­a­tions team takes huge pride in meet­ing and exceed­ing cus­tomer expec­ta­tions, and they have con­tin­ued to do so as they’ve adopt­ed these tools in spite of the mas­sive sup­ply chain chal­lenges that have plagued the indus­try in recent years.”

“In Account­ing,” he said, ​“we have improved trans­paren­cy and effi­cien­cy with S/4HANA and Black­Line. These solu­tions pro­vide cross-com­pa­ny vis­i­bil­i­ty to our finan­cials and a month-end close that’s been reduced from 10 to 5 days, which our team is com­mit­ted to stream­lin­ing fur­ther through automa­tions and oth­er accelerators.”

Although SAP solu­tions to date have served pri­mar­i­ly as Shutterfly’s inter­nal oper­at­ing plat­form, Shutterfly’s Bor­rowLens­es busi­ness unit also rolled out the cus­tomer-fac­ing SAP Hybris Com­merce Cloud por­tal and shop­ping cart expe­ri­ence in 2022 for its pho­to­graph­ic equip­ment rental busi­ness; now, oth­er use cas­es are being explored across the company.

The road ahead

Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion does not come eas­i­ly to most com­pa­nies. While SAP pri­or­i­tizes user expe­ri­ence in its soft­ware design, cus­tomers tran­si­tion­ing from cus­tom-built sys­tems inevitably encounter learn­ing curves with new solu­tions. Suarez acknowl­edges that such obsta­cles are to be expect­ed, and that Shutterfly’s adop­tion of SAP has tak­en time, but his data shows that the num­ber of enhance­ments request­ed by the busi­ness is reduc­ing over time. ​“We’re not per­fect yet, but we’re leagues ahead of when we oper­at­ed dis­parate sys­tems by busi­ness unit,” he said.

Shut­ter­fly has long embraced inno­va­tion and change. ​“It’s made us who we are and keeps us rel­e­vant in the mar­ket,” said Suarez, ​“so we plan to remain agile and lever­age the evo­lu­tion of the SAP cloud strat­e­gy and prod­uct roadmap.”

An exam­ple of that is the cur­rent effort to migrate inte­gra­tions from SAP Process Integration/​Process Orches­tra­tion (PI/PO) to SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form. ​“We are ear­ly in our BTP jour­ney,” accord­ing to Suarez, ​“but there’s a sig­nif­i­cant lev­el of invest­ment from SAP to make it more pow­er­ful and exten­si­ble, and to help cus­tomers real­ize benefits.”

Oppor­tu­ni­ties to extend and lever­age the solu­tion fur­ther abound. ​“The user expe­ri­ence can be enhanced through ana­lyt­ics, chat­bots, robot­ic process automa­tion and AI,” he added, ​“but tech­nol­o­gy isn’t the only answer; we are always work­ing on process improve­ments and user adop­tion which can have a big impact, too.”

What’s next

Suarez is espe­cial­ly excit­ed about increas­ing the agili­ty of the com­pa­ny’s plat­form host­ing oper­a­tions. Shut­ter­fly runs on SAP HANA Enter­prise Cloud (HEC) today and is eval­u­at­ing a move to RISE with SAP S/4HANA, Pri­vate Cloud Edi­tion against alter­na­tive options with mul­ti­ple hyperscalers.

Once migrat­ed, they’ll con­tin­ue with an S/4HANA ver­sion upgrade so that teams across the busi­ness can lever­age the new capa­bil­i­ties. ​“We want to have with our enter­prise sys­tems what has already become sec­ond nature for users of cell phones and elec­tric vehi­cles,” said Suarez. ​“They get reg­u­lar soft­ware updates and expect to ben­e­fit from the improve­ments. We look for­ward to this being a real pos­si­bil­i­ty as the plat­form and host­ing ser­vices evolve in the months and years to come.”

Over­all, Suarez is opti­mistic about the jour­ney. ​“Shutterfly’s SAP expe­ri­ence has been pos­i­tive, and we’ve learned along the way,” he said. ​“It requires a lot of work, everyone’s com­mit­ted to it, and we’re mov­ing in the right direction.”