Enabling Business Agility with SAP Workload Migration to Azure

About COATS

Global industrial thread company COATS is over 260 plus years old having around 20K employees worldwide. To make ordering easier for their customers and product deliveries faster, they needed an IT infrastructure with enhanced operational performance. COATS, hence, needed to move 90% of their datacenters and production database to a better performing SAP database management platform.

They had found no restrictions or negative impacts when using open-source software with Azure earlier. So Brillio, in partnership with Microsoft, helped the company shift the entire database from Oracle to SAP HANA on Azure.

Business Challenge

COATS acknowledges that customers today are in need for more than just great products. They need super-efficient order processing solutions in an environment that helps them stay competitive, regardless of their industry. This required COATS to updates the way they operate.

For years, COATS had been using an Oracle database with its SAP applications. Since they were dealing with multiple customers across the globe, they had to develop many datacenters. They wanted to find a way to connect their offices and datacenters to speed-up their operations and deliveries. But, COATS’ existing database in a complex Oracle environment had become their major deterrent.

Solution

In order to help COATS move its convoluted Oracle environment to SAP HANA on Azure, Brillio configured their SAP HANA estate on Azure. Coats had more than 300 servers running multiple operating systems, and its Oracle database was more than 40 terabytes

Brillio suggested that the SAP deployment should take place in phases. This was result of a holistic bimodal assessment using the Brillio CLIP platform which took into account both the SAP suite and the underlying infrastructure.

Phase 1:

• • • Involved migration of on-premise SAP landscapes to Azure based on application priority profiling

Phase 2:

• • • Involved world’s first migrations of an Oracle 11g database to an SAP HANA on Azure production system

For ongoing management of COATS’ Azure environment, Brillio continues to use CLIP.

Benefits and Business Impact

• Cost Efficiency – 60% TCO reduction and upto 30% execution efficiency
• Same day factory planning instead of previous scenario of taking 24-48 hours
• Time taken for reports reduced exponentially from 6 hours to under 10 minutes
• On-demand capacity, and high level of security with Azure
• Increase in the percentage of customers placing orders online by 90%
• Use of multiple digital channels such as mobile to meet customer expectations
• Use of technology for remote demonstration of high-performance materials that meet customers’ specific needs