Leading Cement Manufacturer Strengthens their IT Strategy, Achieves 99.9% Availability and 60% Increase in Business Growth with Embee and Azure Cloud

About the customer

Customer is a one of the top cement manufacturing companies in India and leading producer of PPC and OPC Cement. With their manufacturing unit established in technical collaboration with a German, industrial engineering giant, the plant upholds the latest environmental norms, technologies, and infrastructure that ensure clean and dust free space.

The organization is driven with a mission to empower each consumer with a perfect beginning to their dreams to create flawless living and workspaces.

Outdated legacy systems hampered production and other business processes

Setup in Rajasthan, the customer’s manufacturing plant has a total capacity of 10.5 billion metric tonnes. The plant is fully automated and centrally controlled. On an average, around 400-500 trucks move inside the plant, taking the material in and out. The organization operate from 10 states with different warehouses and depots for the cement storage.

Previously…

There were several different products and OEMs in the mix that would enable different parts of the process from storage to compute and access. This dependency on multi-technology resources was cumbersome. And the management and monitoring of this multi-platform landscape was extremely exhausting.

Too many datapoints

With the centralized and automated systems, huge amount of data gets generated at any given day, stage, and touchpoint- right from order booking to order assignment to the plant, to logistics planning, all the vehicles’ movement is enabled and captured through IoT, RFID, GPS, to production data and beyond. Customer was heavily dependent on a centralized Enterprise Resource Planning software. Microsoft Dynamics – our clients ERP system was responsible for process integration, financial management, inventory management, asset management and other critical business functions.

Too many breakdowns and stoppages

Keeping systems up and running with an on-premise datacenter was becoming a huge challenge. Despite all their efforts, there were breakdowns and stoppages. Datacenter maintenance, cooling, power-backups, server upgrades were cumbersome at a time when the organization was in an expansion phase. Three years ago, they were at 6.5 Billion Metric Tonnes of production and were targeting at a 50-60% growth in the next couple years.

Need for the right expertise

Operating from a Tier 2 city with limited access to technical resources, customer was not able to predict future workloads or what could be the right technologies for now and for future. Hiring resources to manage on premise datacenter 24×7 did not seem like a very cost-friendly idea. At the same time, keeping data security at the heart of the operations was a challenge. They needed expertise.

Embee + Azure cloud = Business growth

“Our journey with Embee started with O365 migration for almost 700-800 users, which was a successful implementation in all aspects – it was delivered within promised timelines, within allocated budget, and with hassle-free support whenever needed. With this engagement, our faith in Embee only grew stronger. Hence, when we needed to implement datacenter migration to Azure Cloud, Embee was the obvious choice for a reliable technology partner,” says CTO, customer organization.

Application uptime backs the expansion plans

Datacenter downtime spells disaster for a manufacturer. With Datacenter migration for the cement manufacturing company, our main objective was to help customer achieve maximum uptime. For the customer, downtime of their ERP application- Dynamics AX – which was responsible for process integration, finance management, inventory management, and other critical business functions- meant halting the entire production process and creating a chaos. Secondly, customer was in expansion mode, looking to expand production by 50-60%. The anticipated exponential data growth needed a server that was scalable and that came with more cost-effective storage.

Right solution bring back the life in the technology ecosystem

Looking at their varied requirements of higher availability, scalability, cost reduction, and implementation expertise, Embee’s solution team recommended a managed infrastructure solution based on Microsoft Azure’s compute, network, bandwidth, storage, and backup that integrated smoothly with their other existing systems. We delivered a proof-of-concept where we successfully demonstrated the scalability, elasticity and easy manageability of the solution.
We used our proprietary implementation methodology to move customer’s datacenter to the Azure Cloud seamlessly and without any downtime. The migration did not affect any processes at all. Post implementation, Embee’s detailed cloud management training sessions for their IT team further simplified things for the customer.

Solution Results

“The infrastructure is so easy to manage now, that instead of hiring an entire team, we have just one person managing the entire technology ecosystem. With Embee’s CSP Portal, we now have access to easy-to-understand dashboards as well as can easily perform basic operations such as scale-up – scale down workloads, create virtual machines, and much more.” – CTO, Customer organization.

Improved availability and performance

Moving to Azure cloud managed by Embee has enabled customer to achieve improved availability and performance for their Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP, SQL application, with 17 Virtual machines and huge amount of data that gets processed every day. On top of that, customer has massively cut down on costs associated with purchase and maintenance of physical infrastructure- such as cooling, physical space, and electricity. Embee plays an instrumental role in guiding customer through choosing the right technologies and implementing them in a right way.

Expansion sets off on the right foot

With uninterrupted technology system, customer has successfully increased the production by 60% and that means they can now substantially expand, cater to under-tapped geographies.

The cement manufacturing industry is highly competitive in India. And due to the nature of the manufacturing industry, managing different divisions of the unit such as inventory, production, warehousing etc. was critical to the customers’ business success. Embee guided the customer in their move to a more reliable cloud-based solution based on Microsoft Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The solution assured 99.9% application availability, improved infrastructure performance and reduced capital expenditure.