When it comes to innovation, Luminous is by no means in the dark. The manufacturer has been producing a wide range of cutting-edge products in the power backup, battery, home electrical, and solar spaces for the past 30 years by sticking closely to its mission of creating customer delight through innovation and passion.
In its drive to innovate and delight, Luminous has developed a presence in 36 countries across 38 sales offices and seven manufacturing units, and it has amassed 6,000 employees, 60,0000 channel partners, and millions of customers. With growth like that, it was only logical that Luminous turn its innovative powers on itself to ensure it had the capacity and capabilities necessary to continue to deliver the creative solutions on which its customers depend. Luminous found the partners it needed with SAP and Microsoft, bringing their offerings together and deploying RISE with SAP on Azure.
“We made RISE with SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud the backbone of our digital journey—it helps us innovate, integrate, and extend our capabilities on both cloud and hybrid platforms.”
Chander Khanduja, Chief Information Officer, Luminous Power Technologies
Transformation’s guiding light
To keep pace with its growth, Luminous launched an aspirational transformation roadmap to help it develop the digital core it needed to keep innovation operationalized. Luminous chose to make RISE with SAP on Azure the nerve center of this transformation effort. Luminous Chief Information Officer Chander Khanduja states, “We have a 4C digital strategy in place, which stands for Connected People, Connected Products, Connected Processes, and Connected Plants. We made RISE with SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud the backbone of our digital journey—it helps us innovate, integrate, and extend our capabilities on both cloud and hybrid platforms.”
For Luminous, bringing these two digital powerhouses together just made sense. Since its very beginning, Luminous had used SAP solutions and Microsoft as a digital core provider. More recently, the company implemented Azure services for disaster recovery and in support of its Internet of Things (IoT) products. Also, Luminous has long used SAP for its enterprise resource planning. When it began to add more and more SAP cloud solutions and realized that those were available on Azure, it decided to migrate its entire SAP landscape to Azure as the obvious next step. By joining the two together, Luminous not only brought both long-term technology partners under one service-level agreement, but it also better integrated operations and technology support, and established a solid foundation for the company’s digital value creation. Also, in selecting the best cloud platform for SAP, Luminous stood to gain unmatched security and compliance, immediate and intelligent data insights, accelerated automation and innovation capabilities, and the ability to empower its employees with familiar and industry-leading tools.
The SAP and Microsoft teams worked as a unified group, coordinated by a single contact. That meant Luminous could treat the complex integration as the implementation of one technology, rather than two. Khanduja says, “In the process, we gained new platforms like the SAP Business Technology Platform, where we can really kickstart our digital journey by developing new solutions that we integrate everywhere.”
Connecting the bots
Luminous achieved a big win from migrating its SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA on Azure—bringing its implementation of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) together with Azure and Microsoft Teams. With BTP and Teams, Luminous is developing some industry-groundbreaking solutions along with its SAP bot partner Flashkube.
For example, the company’s developers created a sales bot called SalesKUBE that sends customer data directly from the SAP system to Teams, to better integrate real-time data into sales workflows and streamline sales processes. Historically, Luminous sales teams needed to sign into their SAP system or reach out to a designated coordinator to find the sales information they needed. This, of course, caused additional effort and drag for sales teams. The sales bot retrieves vital information sales teams need as they conduct sales meetings or calls, in real time, through the intuitive interface of Teams.
“Having SAP BTP on Azure and interoperable with Teams has really changed the way in which we work,” Khanduja says. “It’s created a lot of operational efficiency because now the data is coming in real time, and there’s only one version of the truth available to salespeople. They can work way more effectively with all our customers, dealers, and distributors.”
Luminous, along with its partner Flashkube, is developing other bots with SAP and Teams integration as well, such as a production bot that will provide fast, accurate data and improved visibility into crucial production-related information. Luminous is also building a tool to enhance its employee experience. The employee bot will access and deliver data from SAP SuccessFactors to employees via Teams to help enable self-service with key HR-related tasks, thereby freeing employees from the need for direct HR help and freeing HR staff to focus on more strategic work. And the company’s business operations teams will receive a dashboard that brings SAP data into Teams to present authoritative, real-time operations data for high visibility, better management, and enhanced risk aversion.
The company considers this bot development not just innovative but a game-changer. Khanduja states, “We are one of the few companies in the world making bots based on the SAP Business Technology Platform and Microsoft Teams, using RISE with SAP on Azure—this is a huge achievement, and we are really proud.”
One comprehensive innovation platform
For Luminous, it’s all about the integrations. The company points to real transformational value gained from its enhanced stability and security combined with the ease of integration facilitated by SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud. Luminous saw a lot of technologies on the market that could simply pull data using an API, but what made SAP’s BTP stand out was the fact that it was a certified technology that could really help ensure data security and assist Luminous in its compliance requirements.
Khanduja says, “What was important for us was not simply a RISE with SAP implementation but the integrations around it. We found Microsoft to be a trusted partner and Azure a key success factor in helping ensure our entire landscape interoperated seamlessly.” This ease and stability of interoperation is pivotal for its ongoing digital transformation. This year alone, Luminous is implementing SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud and using SAP SuccessFactors, Ariba, and Concur, along with Azure IoT Hub and numerous other Azure solutions, to create and enhance digital experiences for its employees and vendors. Luminous uses Microsoft Power BI on Azure to manage all the valuable data generated.
By creating a well-architected, unified environment, Luminous has reduced complexity, increased efficiency, and fortified security, all of which give it a digital core that fosters perpetual innovation. “I think the biggest benefit of moving to SAP BTP on Azure is having one single platform through which we can really integrate and deploy critical, innovative applications. We now have that capability.”
The company’s business groups are delighted by the operational efficiency gains they have been experiencing and by their ability to perform better as a result. And Luminous IT teams can now focus less on simply keeping the lights on and more on developing the innovative solutions the company needs to lead in the years ahead. Khanduja says, “We’re looking forward to creating a new digital culture in the company, with RISE with SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud as our digital core. And that is a good essential core for our digital journey.”
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“Having SAP BTP on Azure and integrated with Teams has really changed the way in which we work. It’s created a lot of operational efficiency because now the data is coming in real time.”
Chander Khanduja, Chief Information Officer, Luminous Power Technologies
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