Romanian pneumatics company Bartrom bolsters resilience by moving its ERP system to Microsoft Azure

Bartrom offers a wide range of pneumatics, vacuum technology, and fluid control solutions to industries throughout Romania. As a mid-size company, the family-run business prides itself on being close to its customers, consistently delivering trustworthy service and quality products, while keeping its expenses in check. 

Building resilience at scale

Bartrom’s IT infrastructure used to be hosted on a single on-premises local server. “After experiencing several power outages, we realized it was central to have a robust backup and disaster recovery solution,” recalls Lucian Bagherea, CEO at Bartrom. “We'd already decided to implement SAP Business One as our new ERP system. So, we started to look for the safest, most flexible environment to deploy it.” Already familiar with Microsoft solutions as Microsoft 365 users, Bartrom’s team saw the Microsoft Azure cloud platform as the natural next step. Supported by solution provider Pepas Cloud, the team completed the implementation smoothly, its positive effects already underway. 

“Thanks to moving to the Azure cloud, we now benefit from highly secure gateways for remote access,” Bagherea explains. “We’ve saved time and money spent on internal IT maintenance and gained in scalability.” Azure Backup also allows for geo-redundant backup storage, which replicates data to a secondary region automatically every day. “If there’s a power failure, the data is automatically pulled from another datacenter and the system will be up and running again almost immediately, minimizing any incurred losses.”

Balancing agility with cost efficiency

The capabilities of the Azure cloud platform also increased the system’s performance. “The launch-time is 80 percent faster than it would have been for a new local server,” observes Bagherea. “And information is transmitted 70 percent faster thanks to the increased virtual machines capability. Both give us a real competitive edge as we can deploy an app or service much more quickly.” 

Thanks to Azure, Bartrom integrated its website with SAP, giving customers quicker access to prices, stock, and orders in real time. Integration with Microsoft 365 via Exchange Online also makes it easy to email accurate quotes to customers rapidly. 

Bartrom’s team welcomed this change, giving positive feedback on the speed of connection and navigation in the management system. “Honestly, I’d advise any small or mid-size business to shift to the cloud. In the long run, it makes more sense cost-wise, it's faster and more secure,” Bagherea concludes. 

Going forward, Bartrom is looking to make deeper use of Microsoft solutions such as Power Platform for process automation and Power BI for self-service analytics, both of which can be easily joined up with SAP.