Varroc Engineering steers high productivity with SAP on Microsoft Azure

Legacy system restricting growth objectives

Varroc’s business operations were powered by an on-premise SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. It was running its operations on a legacy system with dated servers, operating systems, and older versions of SAP and the database. Moreover, Varroc’s data size had increased over 9TB. For optimum performance, the ERP system suggested a database size of 3-4 TB, which meant the rest of the data had to be archived suitably. Disaster Recovery (DR) services, an essential aspect of Business Continuity Planning, were also inefficient. These issues led to a cascading effect on business operations. With increasing performance issues, growth barriers, business continuity risks, and security risks, Varroc felt the need for a system rehaul.

Driving business success with a modern enterprise solution on Microsoft Azure

The team at Varroc had to choose between moving the legacy system to new hardware or adopting a modern cloud-based approach. Migrating to the cloud made sense, as it brings improved business functionality and flexibility. The right cloud solution also offers benefits like optimum costs, updated technology, agility, and greater security. Varroc evaluated a few cloud solutions and chose Microsoft Azure. It was already using Office 365 and liked the comprehensive support that Microsoft offers. Azure offers high availability and scalability and has a simplified monitoring, management, and governance plan. The commercial terms were also attractive. Varroc resolved to migrate to the cloud with SAP SoH (Suite on Hana) on Microsoft Azure IaaS.

InfraBeat Technologies, a Microsoft Partner, implemented the solution with the latest SAP updates and optimized database size in four months. The solution offered a scalable data center infrastructure with Azure Virtual Machines & Azure Storage. The DR landscape hosted on Azure replicates on bare-minimum capacity and scales up dynamically during outages, ensuring the system's resiliency and high availability.

Varroc has gained significant benefits with this modern Azure-based cloud solution:

• Processing times and response times are faster. There has been a whopping 80-90 percent improvement in transaction time. For example, some of the reports that earlier took about 10 minutes to generate can now be created in a minute or two. The build and restore system processing time has been reduced by 78 percent, taking just four hours now compared to 19 hours earlier. Here is a snapshot of the vast improvement in transaction performance after the implementation of the Azure-based system -

• The analytics tools are integrated with SAP SoH (Suite on Hana), the single source of truth in the Azure environment. This enables faster and improved analysis that delivers real value at every level of the business. 
• High availability and business continuity are possible without compromising data residency.
•  With an optimized database reduced to 1.08 TB from 9.35 TB, operational performance is high, and consistent and effective backups are the norm. A backup can now be done in six hours, compared to 31 hours in the legacy system.
• With a comprehensive IT system and all data in the cloud, the Information Technology (IT) and the Operational Technology (OT) teams communicate and collaborate more efficiently.
• The cloud solution is optimized and scalable. It follows a warm standby strategy for DR, with a scaled-down version of the fully functional environment always running in the cloud that can be scaled up dynamically during an outage. It ensures high availability and has reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) without negatively affecting performance and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Besides these business and system benefits, Varroc gained some valuable lessons as well. Vinod Khode , Sr, VP & Group CIO, Varroc shares, "We realized it is critical to have the right implementation partner who can customize the solution to business requirements innovatively and support the end-to-end experience of all stakeholders. InfraBeat Technologies, with its solid technical experience, helped us implement the solution successfully. We also learned that it is important to have an all-inclusive plan for a complex solution such as this, to minimize disruption and ensure smooth adoption by internal and external customers.” 

Taking the driver’s seat to be future-ready

Varroc has concrete plans to leverage the solution further to be future-ready. Pleased with the solution, Vinod Khode - Group CIO, Varroc, says, "We have integrated non-SAP workloads to the enterprise Azure cloud for higher efficiency. We plan to integrate our PLM, IOT, supplier portal and human resource system within this system. We are also looking at creating a data lake and data warehouse solution that is aligned with our data strategy. With the automotive sector at an advanced stage with IoT, we want to invest in a scalable and configurable IoT platform in the near future."