LEVERAGING SAP BUSINESS ONE ON MICROSOFT AZURE FOR BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

May 29, 2019
Posted by: H One Private Limited

Company Background:

Lina is the first Respiratory Care Research and Manufacturing facility in Sri Lanka producing a line of Respiratory Care Products together with an Inhaler Device. The factory was acquired by Akbar Pharmaceuticals (Pvt) Ltd in the year 2010 and commercial production commenced on 1st of April 2011.

Akbar Pharmaceuticals is a fully owned subsidiary of Akbar Group of companies engaged in diverse business activities from its main business of export of tea. They have now focused on Health Care, FMCG, Leisure, Transport, Hydro and Wind Power.

As a newly formed company, Lina had already chosen SAP Business One as their ERP solution from Pristine. Lina required an agile solution to manage its overall infrastructure including SAP Business One on cloud. As the business continued to grow in a dynamic environment, Lina aspired to stay ahead of today’s cloud-based world. Hence Lina, entered in to a strategic partnership with H One to immediately commence the deployment of SAP Business One on Cloud using Microsoft Azure

The Challenge:

As part of Digital Transformation journey, Lina began a project to run mission-critical business systems such as SAP Business One, more economically.

Lina carefully evaluated the options of hosting SAP Business One on-premise or on cloud in terms of cost, speed, and agility which is vital – for business to act fast, make insightful predictions, and sound decision-making. Therefore, Lina needed to realize the full value of their SAP systems on Azure to accelerate its digital agenda, as legacy SAP no longer meets today’s business needs.

The following requirements were identified.

To reliably run and deploy the SAP products and solutions faster with no lagging
Eliminate the hassle of building and managing infrastructure in-house
To make SAP environment more cost effective by paying for what is used (Pay-as-you-go) to minimize operations costs and leverage existing investment
To expand and manage the resources to meet business needs (scalability tied to business growth)
Required easy and economical high availability (less downtime), backup, and disaster recovery services for business continuity.

The Solution:

Lina entered into a strategic partnership with Pristine and H One and began a systematic effort to deploy their ERP solution (SAP Business One) on Azure and gain greater agility. Thus, Lina sought to meet its enterprise SAP solutions requirement on a hyperscale public cloud ‘Microsoft Azure’ due to its reliability to run and deploy solutions faster on a scalable, secured, and future-proof cloud platform. Moreover, the uniqueness of Azure lies in the enterprise-proven cloud platform which offers a smooth and seamless transition to the cloud by offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Lina, runs SAP Business One in an Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment, including Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Network, Azure Storage, and Azure Backup. H One proposed Azure Reserved instances (RI) for the predictable workloads in IaaS environment, where using three-year RI, Lina saves approx. 70% compared to pay-as-you-go prices

By using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to run SAP Business One, H-One provides Lina pay-as-you-go access to storage, networking and other resources in the cloud. Furthermore, no hassle of building and managing infrastructure in-house as the burden of security and maintenance are solely handled by Microsoft

H One manages and supports the Azure environment as a managed service offering, which includes provisioning and management of services. H One also provides insights into cloud spending, utilization of resources, and continual recommendations to cost-optimization.

The Impact:

With SAP Business One on Azure, helps Lina to:

Significantly improve business processes and increase efficiency by optimizing its operations than would have been possible in an on-premises environment.
It is more than just a deployment option, it is an enabler of expanded capabilities – to move faster, accelerate innovation and time-to-value with improved agility.
Offers end-to-end, real-time, and data-driven insight and predictions for decision making to thrive in new markets and to reinvent in existing market.
On-tap scalability to operate during peak usage period, business growth and expansion – supports to scale-up or scale-down easily depending on SAP workload or business need.
Lower costs and total costs of ownership (TCO) due to paying for only what is required (pay-as-you-go) and the scale of cloud can drive down costs over time. This includes turning-off resources when not in use, reduction in IT management overhead costs and so on.