Bumrungrad International Hospital optimizes SAP systems by moving to Microsoft Azure

“Care for the people” is the direct translation of the Thai word, “Bumrungrad.” Compassion, comfort, convenience, and coordination are guiding doctrines that take Bumrungrad International Hospital’s name from words into daily practice. These principles ensure that the hospital caregivers treat every patient equally and diligently, no matter where that patient may be from. This means, for example, that the hospital uses a one-price policy for everyone whatever their nationality and that more than 200 interpreters cover the language needs for clients from nearly any country. 

Founded in 1980, Bumrungrad International Hospital has been a global pioneer in providing world-class healthcare services and international patient support. Located in the heart of Bangkok, Thailand, it is one of the largest private hospitals in Southeast Asia. Bumrungrad International Hospital cares for more than 1.1 million patients from more than 190 countries annually. Through its consistent clinical standards and many international accreditations, Bumrungrad International Hospital has demonstrated some of the highest clinical success rates and lowest infection rates in the region and the world. 

Bumrungrad International Hospital's SAP S/4HANA system, an enterprise resourcing planning system that manages accounting and finances, is a vital part of the hospital's daily operations. Ignacio Diaz Sanchez, Chief Information Officer at Bumrungrad International Hospital, is responsible for all the hospital’s information systems. As Diaz Sanchez says, “With our original SAP S/4HANA contract and provider, we had no control over our own finances and minimal control over their system. The back-office staff, including the IT team, had to work on weekends, nights, and holidays to complete upgrades, with a downtime of eight to twelve hours every time. Inevitably, some of these upgrades spilled over into clinic hours, leaving staff unable to process vendor invoices, order supplies, and more.”

In early 2023, a budgetary challenge compelled the hospital to reconsider its cloud hosting and managed services options as it could not afford any business interruptions. It needed to migrate to a new cloud services provider and managed services partner, complete the move within just five months, and protect 40 years of its financial records. 

A swift migration to Microsoft Azure 

The hospital needed a dependable cloud provider almost immediately. Moving everything was a major undertaking. Any unplanned downtime could cost the hospital a few million dollars, along with potential lost business, diminished patient goodwill, and unnecessary regulatory scrutiny. As Thailand has no local data centers, Bumrungrad needed to work with one of the major cloud providers and depend on a Singapore-based data center. 

With next-to-no time to implement an alternative solution, the Microsoft ASEAN Azure SAP team jumped in quickly. The team reviewed the technical specifications, identified cost-saving optimizations, and determined how to improve availability. “As we were planning our next steps,” says Diaz, “Microsoft showed us that our existing solution capacity was greater, and our reference architecture was more complex than we needed. We had over-architected infrastructure and capacity—these were costing us money and limiting efficiency.”  

The Microsoft team helped Bumrungrad International Hospital work with an array of local partners and vendors to set up managed services and ensure that all could go according to plan in just three months rather than the anticipated (and dreaded) six-to-eight-month timeline. “Without service interruptions, last-minute IT firefighting, or outages, we and the Microsoft ASEAN team completed the successful migration of SAP S/4HANA to Microsoft Azure before our fast-approaching deadline,” notes Diaz. 

The benefits of a right-sized cloud solution 

“Our employees can work in a more intuitive way,” says Diaz. “When our SAP on Azure system is working properly, it should be pretty much invisible to our employees because it’s just getting the job done in the background with no drama—and so far, we’ve experienced nothing but peace.” 

Bumrungrad International Hospital has seen substantial benefits from moving to Azure. The hospital gained more consistent system availability, more visibility into its SAP S/4HANA system, and a more reliable disaster recovery solution. Right-sizing the infrastructure has lowered the cost of operations, and the hospital now has a highly optimized SAP S/4HANA architecture founded on best practices from Azure. And the new managed services model enables Bumrungrad International Hospital to have higher control of its destiny, including the ability to transition to alternative managed services partners more easily in the future. 

“We are grateful to our advisors from Azure for our safe and risk-free adoption,” says Diaz. “With their help, we were able to move everything according to plan. In my history with the delivery for software services, that’s never happened before.” 

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