Singapore precision plastics manufacturer uses Microsoft Cloud to improve business productivity and collaboration

Sunningdale Tech Ltd manufactures precision plastic components for clients in the healthcare, automotive, consumer, and IT industries. Headquartered in Singapore, Sunningdale has 17 manufacturing plants across nine countries, providing one-stop turnkey plastics solutions, including mould fabrication, injection moulding, and precision assembly. 

The company previously relied on an on-premise infrastructure for its operations, which included many incompatible third-party applications. “We used different platforms in-house that ran everything, which were outdated and not very efficient,” says Anthony Pua, Chief Information Officer at Sunningdale. Licensing was also a challenge the company needed to overcome if it wanted to scale up. “Licensing was complex for on-premise infrastructure because each app or platform required a different license. This made it difficult to keep track of all validity periods, payments, and updates. We needed to consolidate everything and provide a common platform for our employees to work, connect, and collaborate securely online,” adds Beny Erlano, Global IT Infrastructure Manager at Sunningdale.  

To become more efficient, the company needed to shift much of its on-premise infrastructure to a hybrid cloud solution. “Ideally, I’d wanted to move everything to the cloud so there’s no need to host any server. But we had to host some applications on-premise due to latency issues as well as some regulatory requirements,” explains Pua. “But we know that digitalization is not just about the software, it’s about the whole culture and mindset of the people as well. We wanted to empower our users to achieve more—to give them ownership of their documents and the benefits of working, collaborating, and communicating on a secure digital platform.” 
 

Quick migration, efficient solution 

Working with Sunningdale on its cloud transition was Microsoft and cloud services provider SoftwareONE. Microsoft offered implementation support to Sunningdale, while SoftwareONE was the one-stop shop for product licensing. The shift has made licensing management simpler; instead of going through different channels and payments for separate software licenses, Sunningdale now pays for a single software-as-a-service subscription throughout the organization. “It’s much more straightforward to manage now. We only need to make a call and activate everything on the back end,” says Pua. 

Sunningdale also experienced a smooth transition to the cloud thanks to Microsoft support. Beny Erlano recalls that Microsoft support facilitated the migration for more than 2,700 users and helped with complete documentation that answered many questions long before the team sought answers. “This is the fastest migration I have encountered in my IT career. It only took us two weeks to migrate to the Exchange mailbox from our on-premise infrastructure,” recalls Erlano.  

For its operations, Sunningdale chose SAP S/4HANA on Azure, which can run in both local and cloud environments. The system offered high performance that suited Sunningdale’s precision manufacturing requirements—a critical consideration. In addition, the new hybrid cloud infrastructure gave Sunningdale the flexibility to scale without sacrificing capacity. “Moving to the Microsoft cloud has allowed us to scale down a lot of complex infrastructure and services that were affecting our environment,” explains Pua. “For example, our on-premise servers in the Singapore headquarters have been downsized from 94 to 62 servers, while another data center has been whittled down from 111 servers to 11. This has enabled us to really optimize our resources and save cost on on-premise infrastructure.” 

The cloud has helped Sunningdale cope with situations such as the recent economic downturn: the company was able to scale down based on new requirements, with the potential to scale up when needed without impacting costs.  

Collaborating securely in the cloud

Having migrated part of its infrastructure to the cloud, Sunningdale now connects its on-premise network to Microsoft 365 (M365) with Azure ExpressRoute. It enables employees from locations around the world to easily work together online via M365 tools. “It’s changed the way we work—we’re not tied down by only one tool, we have a whole host of ways to connect and communicate. We can hold meetings online and share files through SharePoint with anyone within the whole company. It’s so much more effective for our collaboration,” says Pua.  

The company also enjoys better security thanks to M365. The system encrypts data both at rest and in-transit, with technologies that include Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer (TLS/SSL), Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). “Microsoft 365 also runs regular updates automatically, so we now have a better security posture,” explains Pua.
  

The security upgrade is in line with Sunningdale’s new focus on security and threat protection as they gear up to service bigger clients. “Certain companies expect conformity to a higher security standard before we can do business,” Pua explains. “With Microsoft, we can reliably say that we are compliant. We expect to add Azure Sentinel/SIEM (security information and event management) and threat protection to our infrastructure in the future as well to increase strengthen our security.” 
 

Moving forward 

Sunningdale plans to harness the SAP Azure platform in novel ways, extending its infrastructure’s capacity by including other services from Azure. “We want to leverage Azure ExpressRoute to do more in our environment,” explains Pua. “We’re looking at data lake applications that we can host in Azure and data analytics as well.”  
 

The team at Sunningdale will also leverage augmented reality through HoloLens for business visits, which will allow virtual meetings to take place even when participants cannot arrive in person. Pua shares a couple of examples: “One of our engineers did a demo for a customer who wasn’t able to travel to our Singapore factory due to the pandemic,” he recalls. “We also did a whole walkthrough of the whole plant to a customer sitting somewhere in India.”  
 

The shift to the hybrid cloud will allow Sunningdale to develop a wide variety of HoloLens-driven use cases in the future with a combination of Microsoft cloud solutions, including the enablement of smart manufacturing using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist as well as more realistic virtual visits. “We hope to do more augmented or virtual reality meetings through the metaverse, which will give us a richer online experience,” says Pua.  
 

To reach its goals, Sunningdale intends to expand its resources and skill sets to increase its expertise, with the help of both hands-on and online training from Microsoft. “It will take some time because there’s lots of things to be done. But it’s the beginning of a whole journey and I think we’ve taken the right opportunity to start,” concludes Pua.