Perrigo takes on the future with enhanced agility, flexibility, and scalability with SAP on Azure

You don’t stay in business for 130 years without knowing how to change. Markets shift, tastes fluctuate, demand ebbs and flows, and customers come and go. A company’s capacity to remain valuable and valued depends on its ability to anticipate change and reposition itself time and time again.

Perrigo knows this better than anyone else. Born in Michigan, Perrigo rose to become a major, worldwide producer and supplier of consumer self-care products for businesses that include some of the largest retailers in the world. Today, Perrigo is pivoting to make lives better by bringing high-quality, affordable self-care products, that consumers trust, everywhere they are sold. To keep pace with change, Perrigo needed more versatility and flexibility in its digital infrastructure to help it meet its customers where they are, today and tomorrow. Perrigo found exactly what it needed in SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud.

Architecting agility

Technology underlies everything Perrigo does. With 1,000 or so core products tailored for each of its customers, it needs to track tens of thousands of SKUs and manage shipments all over the world. From supply chain through financials, Perrigo depends on technology to deliver the highest product quality. As Brian Marr, Perrigo’s Vice President of Global Information Technology and Services, puts it, “Quality is embedded in our DNA and our mission statement, so we have to get it right 100 percent of the time, and SAP on Azure provides us with the scalability and reliability we need to get there.”

The company had a long-standing and rock-solid on-premises SAP environment, but after significant growth through a series of acquisitions, Perrigo wanted to streamline its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. It identified finance as the most strategic place to begin. Marr states, “We stepped back to see what the best solution should be for a central finance system, one that was capable of bringing together data from multiple systems to act as the single source of truth for finance. SAP S/4HANA for central finance and Microsoft infrastructure as a service were the clear winners.”

Perrigo’s SAP on Azure implementation includes core master data domains, like vendor, customer, material, and financial object data, to help optimize finance-related transactions. It also includes sandbox, development, test, and QA environments, along with production and disaster recovery systems. Its production and QA environments use clusters to support the applications. Perrigo uses SAP’s S/4HANA synchronous replication technology to maintain high availability, so if one node fails, SAP S/4HANA for central finance can stay up and running on its other node in Microsoft Azure.

For backup and disaster recovery, Perrigo uses Azure NetApp Files to conduct database backup and replicates database transactions to the Azure South Central US region for disaster recovery, using Zerto to replicate its application server. The deployment has two functional integration environments, each running on SAP S/4HANA and SUSE Linux, and the vast majority of Perrigo’s SAP on Azure environment runs on Azure Disk Storage.

The advantage of Azure and the Microsoft Cloud

Perrigo’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft, dating back to its Microsoft 365 implementation, helped inform its decision to run SAP on Azure. The company valued the seamless interoperability it gained with SAP on Azure, from its use of Azure Active Directory to Azure Virtual Desktop. Indeed, Perrigo is enjoying the newfound ability to spin up virtual desktops for its finance team. Some SAP reporting clients using physical laptops were facing constraints in their reporting. Perrigo was able to create virtual desktop instances to spin up work environments with significantly greater memory.

The seamlessness of the solution helps Perrigo’s finance team members get their work done with the resources they need, without ever having to think about infrastructure. James Egan, Perrigo’s Director of IT Infrastructure Engineering, says, “The fact that people don’t actually know or need to know where their applications are running is huge. It’s probably the biggest indicator of success.” TJ Wilkinson, Perrigo’s Associate Director of Global SAP Infrastructure, seconds this, adding, “SAP on Azure feels exactly like a Perrigo datacenter, but with the reliability, scalability, and agility that Azure brings to the table. It is there, it is available, and it performs.”

The freedom and flexibility of the cloud

Perrigo’s decision to move its finance workloads to SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud has enabled the company to gain the scale and flexibility it needed without adding any hardware. Its cloud journey began before COVID-19, but the ensuing supply chain challenges have made the construction of additional datacenter capacity that much more challenging—and that much less appealing. And, with the amount of scale that Perrigo anticipates, the company determined that finding capacity by expanding its datacenter footprint was simply the wrong way to go. “In a tight, supply chain–constrained environment, getting the hardware required to run day-to-day operations would have put Perrigo in a non-scalable state,” says Marr. “One of our mantras is to build in advance of the need, to make sure we’re ready for whatever comes next. SAP on Azure is helping us do that.”

Perrigo can now scale up and down rapidly to meet finance workloads and support finance projects. Historically, scaling up to meet demand might have taken months, and in some cases years, but the capacity Perrigo finds with Azure helps it achieve finance capacity requirements quickly and easily. Egan recalls, “I don’t ever remember a project where I was asked to double the size of the datacenter in a week, but with SAP on Azure, we were able to do that without any real thought. It was just possible.”

This flexibility helps Perrigo work more efficiently and cost-effectively, too. The company can add and decommission systems as necessary. Wilkinson explains, “With SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud, we can expand current servers and add new systems quickly. It makes it easy for us to quickly decommission systems as soon as we’re done, to save money.”

Adds Marr, “The ability to literally push a button and change system sizing as projects dictate is a game-changer for us. The biggest advantage we get with SAP on Azure is our ability to rapidly react to changing business needs.”

Ready for anything

With its ability to scale, Perrigo is ready for what’s next. The company has begun to identify some operational SAP workloads—like supply chain, forecasting, and shop floor management—that might benefit from the added agility, scalability, and data integration won by moving SAP environments to Azure. It’s also reviewing other Azure products, such as Azure Machine Learning, to see how Perrigo might gain greater analytic insight and begin to automate key processes. “Data is absolutely a strategic asset for Perrigo,” says Marr. “With SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud, the art of the possible is now within our grasp.”

Perrigo has traditionally used off-the-shelf applications. But with its SAP on Azure implementation, it can increase its custom development solutions through Azure products and services.

Most important of all, Perrigo has set itself up to react and respond to an increasingly disruption-prone and ever-changing business climate. Establishing a reliable, scalable, and agile infrastructure means Perrigo can spend less time chasing down infrastructure problems and finding capacity and more time on strategic goals and continuous improvement.

By deploying its SAP finance workloads to such a powerful cloud platform, Perrigo is setting itself up to take advantage of comprehensive security and compliance, intelligent insights from its numerous data sources, automation and innovation to accelerate transformation, and familiar productivity and collaboration tools to empower its employees.

With SAP on Azure, Perrigo has built the scale and flexibility it needs to be ready for whatever comes its way. Marr concludes, “I’m proud of the work our team has done to position us to be ready for whatever Perrigo needs next. I don’t have a crystal ball to know exactly what acquisitions, divestitures, or other business changes might be coming, but now, with SAP on Azure in place, we’re ready for whatever is next.”

Find out more about Perrigo on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.