Eureka Forbes’ Eureka Moment on the Cloud – Efficiencies and Agility Unlocked with Microsoft Azure
Case in point: Eureka Forbes Limited
At a glance
In the wake of increasing competition and rising demand for modernization, leading players in the consumer goods industry race to create a sustainable competitive edge. Much of the differentiation is driven through process automation, operational efficiencies to drive economies at scale, and creation of customer delight through empowered employees. One such front-runner in this transformation landscape is Eureka Forbes Limited, India’s leading health and hygiene brand - powered by Microsoft Azure.
Part of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, Eureka Forbes is a multi-product, multichannel organization, serving over 20 million customers across 1,500 cities in India and 40 countries worldwide. Its product portfolio encompasses water purification, vacuum cleaning, air purification, and home security solutions. The company safeguards the productivity of its 7,800-plus employees and meets the demands of millions of external consumers through Microsoft Azure.
Business challenge
More than 7,800 employees of Eureka Forbes utilize front-end sales force automation mobile apps which interface to back-end SAP systems. The SAP system supports planning, procurement, production, sales, and payroll management. Four key SAP applications are used across processes: SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM), SAP Business Warehouse (BW), and SAP Enterprise Portal (EP). On SAP ECC, for instance, the company handles approximately 140,000 sales orders, 100,000 invoices, and 65,000 purchase orders per month.
Since most sales usually occurred close to the end of the month, the company’s legacy systems struggled to handle the 2.5 to 3x peak workloads. Unable to conduct high-volume, concurrent transactions, Eureka Forbes faced slow response, affecting day-to-day activities like accessing stock data, generating reports, and filing Goods and Services Tax (GST). The organization faced operational complexities with its on-premises datacenters.
“A key issue we used to face with IBM AIX, despite its robust nature, was with the interlinking of versions of SAP development, quality assurance (QA), and production systems as sequential operations. Every version upgrade required us to set aside around 72 hours for data backup and QA,” says Khushru Mistry, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President at Eureka Forbes. This timeline made it impossible for the company to introduce improvements without impacting the existing system and bringing everything to a standstill.
With its on-premises IT systems nearing the end of life, the company decided to migrate its Tier-1 payload (SAP) into the cloud.
Industry 4.0 solution
To take advantage of technology as a strategic growth driver, Eureka Forbes was looking for an IT platform that would scale up and be flexible enough to respond to seasonal fluctuations on demand. It was weighing options to optimize IT costs and datacenter infrastructure, while also planning ahead to employ AI and IoT to enhance business processes.
To accelerate the performance of four core applications, the company migrated its on-premises SAP with Oracle database (AIX) systems to SAP with Oracle (Oracle Linux) on Microsoft Azure. The migration included implementation of Azure services, such as Azure Backup to have continuous real-time backup of data; sound data management mechanism with near-zero downtime with Disaster Recovery options, alongside Azure Express Route for high reliability and connectivity with low latency; and Azure Site Recovery for replicating non-SAP systems. This is a process that is currently underway.
Post-migration, Eureka Forbes is taking advantage of other services like Logic Apps, which is integrated with SAP system to send e-invoices to business users; Traffic Analytics; and Network Watcher to monitor network traffic.
“With our on-premises systems, data replication used to take up to three hours, but after moving to Azure, it takes under 15 minutes, making our transactions more seamless than ever,” remarks Mistry. “ Adding to this, the trusted ecosystem of Microsoft’s cloud partners sealed the deal for us.”
Business outcomes
Eureka Forbes recorded significant performance improvements in its daily operations, especially during peak times. After migrating its core SAP applications to Azure, the dynamic horizontal and vertical scaling allowed sales personnel to focus on meeting monthly targets instead of processing them.
“We’re now easily generating about 150,000 invoices and catering to around 1,000,000 service orders per month in a timely manner - ultimately helping us better serve our customers with faster responses,” explains Mistry.
While employees involved in the operations benefited from quick loading of required data with no latency, application developers benefited from lightning-fast synchronization of Development, QA, and Production modules in the cloud.
“What used to take close to three full days, now just takes under 60 minutes on Azure,” concludes Mistry.
Using in-memory computing capabilities, drag-and-drop features, and higher storage, Eureka Forbes envisions a future-ready environment - today.