Edgewell moves to SAP on Azure, strengthening BCDR and innovation on the Microsoft Cloud

Modernizing a large SAP estate in Azure

Edgewell formed as a publicly traded entity in 2015, creating an IT organization that relied on SAP as its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for running most of the organization’s business processes. Technology has evolved at an extremely fast pace since then, and Edgewell was challenged by disparate, outdated systems in use across its environment. As a result, the company mobilized and began a cloud journey about two and a half years ago.

The company wanted to start by replicating the infrastructure base that ran its SAP estate using a managed service datacenter partner to support that infrastructure, but the arrangement was costly and inefficient. Additionally, it wanted enhanced services, more options to spur innovation, and to get out of the datacenter management business.

Working with Khoj Information Technology, Inc., a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, Edgewell embraced a plan to migrate its entire SAP estate to SAP on Azure. The move was implemented seamlessly over a nine-month period, allowing the company shut down the datacenter in September 2022, and Edgewell’s SAP estate now runs entirely on the Microsoft Cloud. The Edgewell team is secure in the wisdom of its choice of Azure. “We were always a big Microsoft shop, but that doesn’t mean it was an easy decision,” says Ravi Ponnaganti, Senior Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer at Edgewell Personal Care. “At the end of the day, all the cloud provider options are strong from a technology perspective, but the responsiveness of the Microsoft team and the interconnected services and solutions really lined up to give us certainty in going with Azure. It was unanimous across our teams.”

Migration complexities for Edgewell and Khoj

Edgewell’s migration was complex. Its entire range of ERP products and all core business processes were in scope, including its manufacturing, sales, finance, and supply chain capabilities. The migration encompassed many different SAP systems, including S/4 HANA and SAP ECC, plus several systems for tasks like B2B transactions and tax management. “These bolt-on systems are what we call our ‘friends of SAP,’ which work closely with SAP and provide the process functionality we need to run our core business work,” says Sid Joshi, Global Director of Information Technology at Edgewell Personal Care. “Making sure we could continue integrating with them was very important, and Azure makes that process easy.”

The migration involved more than 100 virtual machines running on Intel processors with a mix of 90 percent Windows Server and 10 percent Linux on Azure. Some of Edgewell’s S4/HANA database servers are massive, so the Khoj team used Azure M-series virtual machines, which are specifically geared toward HANA databases, and Azure Premium SSD storage. The company also uses Premium SSDs for non-SAP enterprise workloads to maximize performance. To meet the challenge of migrating and managing SAP changes and to minimize risk in its complex environments, Khoj and Edgewell deployed a parallel N+1 landscape to enable developing and testing in a separate landscape without disrupting regular business. In a traditional on-premises environment, this approach requires a full hardware procurement cycle, but Azure simplifies the process. Edgewell and Khoj can spin up an instance, do the migration work, and then spin it down. “Azure has given us the flexibility and agility to instantly scale up workloads and easily see where our cost impact is,” says William Spencer, Global Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations at Edgewell Personal Care.

Using its own migration methodologies and HANA System Replication and Azure Site Recovery technologies, Khoj was able to mitigate the overall risk of a very complex SAP migration—15 disparate SAP products and 6 bolt-on products—on an aggressive schedule. “We far exceeded our established SLAs,” says Ajay Dhingra, Founder and President of Khoj Information Technology, Inc. “We achieved a recovery point objective of less than 20 seconds for HANA DB and under 60 minutes for non-HANA, coupled with a recovery time objective of 4 hours and 8 hours for critical and noncritical applications.”

Prioritizing business continuity and disaster recovery

An important element of Edgewell’s move to the Microsoft Cloud was improving its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) posture. An unacceptable level of risk was inherent in its previous partner-managed services arrangement, so a critical part of Khoj’s work was achieved by setting up a robust disaster recovery environment using Azure Site Recovery and a multiregional strategy to provide recoverability.

As a result, Spencer has newfound confidence about the company’s BCDR stance. “The last piece of the migration project was the disaster recovery environment,” he says. “Moving to Azure and partnering with Khoj and the structure it brought to that process means I can sleep better at night knowing that workloads are up to specification and that we have Khoj managing the security piece.” Adds Ponnaganti, “Edgewell can promise our businesses that in crisis scenarios, with Azure technology, we have specific recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives to bring servers back up, and we exceed our SLAs, which is phenomenal. Azure solutions, along with people and ecosystem capabilities from Khoj, have put us in a much better place than we were before.”

Microsoft Cloud solutions bring more value to Edgewell

Edgewell is using Azure to find enhancements for a broad range of capabilities, including simplifying its overall footprint by migrating non-SAP workloads, expanding its Microsoft 365 functionality, and harnessing Azure AI in the analytics space. The company used some Azure capabilities for analytics prior to the migration, but it had concerns about the costs, security, and complexity of data transfers to the new environment. Because the Azure migration process was seamless, Edgewell is now managing large datasets in Power BI on Azure queries.

Analyzing and keeping the company’s environments up to date has become a smooth and reliable process using Azure Monitor daily for automated health checks and immediate updates and Azure update management for patch management purposes. “When the lights work every day, you kind of take uninterrupted service for granted,” says Spencer. “But Azure Monitor has made a difference, and we’ve definitely had far fewer outages since moving our SAP environment to Azure.” Adds Ramya Nair, Director of ERP on Cloud Solutions at Khoj Information Technology, Inc., “In the first quarter after the migration, we saw 99.97 percent availability across all migrated SAP and bolt-on applications, even exceeding our established SLA of 99.9 percent, and the Planned Maintenance Success KPI was reported at 100 percent.”

All of these new capabilities add up to peace of mind, flexibility, and the ability for Edgewell to focus on innovation instead of simply maintaining routines. “With Azure, we now have many more infrastructural capabilities without increasing our overhead costs,” says Spencer. The team can count on quick access to compute, being charged only when it needs a significant boost in time-to-market capabilities. “We used to need weeks to set up servers, but now with Azure, it’s as fast as the resource can get to the request,” says Ponnaganti. “It’s been a tremendous lead time improvement, and we’re moving much faster as a company.”

The collaboration between Edgewell, Khoj, and Microsoft will continue expanding into new areas such as sustainability, where Edgewell is investing heavily and beginning to find alignment and value overlap in conversations around how Azure can help accelerate organizational goals. “Our move to SAP on Azure has been a game-changer,” states Ponnaganti. “I’m grateful to have Microsoft’s support and a strong partner like Khoj to ensure that our first step was done right. It’s an awesome accomplishment.”

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