Metrie, a leading manufacturer and distributor of interior finishings for North America, needed to expand the capabilities of its SAP infrastructure. The problem was, the company’s existing cloud provider couldn’t cope with the new demand. Working with Qnovate, Metrie moved its SAP estate—core to almost every element of the business—to Microsoft Azure. The move not only granted the scalability required for future functionalities, but it gave the company back the control and security over its operations that aging cloud infrastructure had begun to erode.
“In the Quality Triangle, there are inherent tradeoffs in cost, project speed, and performance. Usually, you get to pick two as your benefits. With SAP on Azure and Qnovate, we got to have all three.”
Andrew Taylor, Manager of IT Systems, Metrie
Founded in 1926, Metrie is a leading manufacturer and distributor of architectural moldings and interior doors across North America. “Our goal is to beautify spaces and to help turn houses into homes,” says Andrew Taylor, Manager of IT Systems at Metrie. Family-owned since its inception, Metrie aims to extend a familiar, inviting experience to its customers and employees alike. As technology becomes the dominant means of doing business in this traditional space, the ability to provide industry-leading, real-time service internally and externally has become increasingly dependent on the company’s IT infrastructure.
“We’re steadily on the lookout for solutions that make it easier to transact with us,” continues Taylor. “For us, that means maintaining a modernized, flexible SAP estate.” SAP technology is the foundation of operations at Metrie. The company’s finance and sales departments, supply chain and inventory management, shipping and distribution, and treasury operations depend on SAP to function. “Without SAP, we wouldn’t be able to provide the level of service our customers have come to expect from us,” adds Taylor.
Therefore, when the company’s existing cloud provider began to experience scalability and performance challenges related to its lack of investment in new technology, Metrie needed to act fast. “We began to see delays, small ones at first, during peak usage hours,” says Taylor. “But when those delays are experienced by our customers as they call us looking for a quote or asking for assistance, every second matters.”
Migrating with confidence
Metrie’s systems see approximately 550 peak users today, but that number is steadily increasing. A new retail app, currently in development, will itself generate a triple-digit user increase. “Thankfully, we were at end of contract with our existing cloud partner,” says Will Crichton, Director of IT Operations at Metrie. “That window of opportunity allowed us to pull our SAP cloud migration forward by about a year—which is why we reached out to Microsoft when we did.” Though Metrie had been eyeing a potential migration of its SAP infrastructure to the cloud for a number of years, the company wanted to wait until it saw a track record of success among other, earlier adopters. It found that migration solution with SAP on Azure. “We saw a lot of success among the earlier adopters of SAP on Azure,” says Crichton. “That was a testament to the strengths of both companies and the closeness of their relationship.”
Once apprised of Metrie’s needs, Microsoft brought the SAP on Azure experts at Qnovate into the conversation. A member of the Microsoft Partner Network, Qnovate specializes in SAP infrastructure and cloud implementation. “We were impressed with the long history of success at Qnovate, along with its strong focus on developing long-lasting customer relationships,” says Crichton. “When you’re moving a foundational system, you want to work with experts that you trust.”
Aided by Qnovate, Metrie was able to expedite the move of its SAP infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. “In the past, when we wanted to update or change our infrastructure, the process could take several weeks,” recalls Crichton. “With Azure, we can now make those changes in a matter of hours.” Aided by Qnovate, Metrie used Azure-native replication to move its virtual machines to Azure, and for its 2 terabyte SAP HANA instance, the company relied on SAP’s built-in replication technology.
Metrie made the shift in phases. First to migrate was the company’s development environment, followed by its quality assurance environment, and finally the production environment. Each migration was followed by a short testing phase. “From a downtime perspective, it was great to see even our production environment shift to Azure over a single weekend,” says Taylor. “Outside of their knowledge of a prescribed downtime period, our users didn’t even seem to notice the changeover.”
Realizing immediate benefits
Because many of the company’s manufacturing sites are in operation 24 hours a day, any downtime equates to a loss of productivity. It was therefore a boon to the company that each of its successive migrations were completed in less than the prescribed time periods. “One of the fastest return on investment [ROI] metrics we can see from our migration to Azure is that of our investment on newer technology,” says Laurie Kane, IT Business Systems Analyst at Metrie. “The SAP on Azure migration speed has been part of that ROI, as has the speed with which we’ve been able to get our new retail app moving.”
This increase in adaptability translates also to the realm of data security—and the company found success in adopting Microsoft Defender for Cloud. “Security is important to us, and we make sure to keep up with updates,” says Taylor. “With our previous cloud provider, we had to carve out at least 12 hours, once a quarter, to update or scan our systems. Now that we use Defender for Cloud, we no longer have to wait for a predetermined time to run scans. Instead, we have real-time insights and updates that take less than four hours.”
Kane has seen the company’s ability to prove compliance increase as well. “We’ve gone from hour-long compliance meetings to 20-minute check-ins,” says Kane. “We didn’t have access to a lot of the required information previously, so we often found ourselves placing follow-up calls to our cloud provider for additional data. This year, we could provide everything that was required for an assessment right off the bat.”
Since the SAP migration, Metrie has also used Azure Site Recovery, an Azure-native disaster recovery service that includes replication, failover, and recovery processes. “I sleep better at night knowing that our data now replicates with Azure Site Recovery in near real time,” says Taylor. “And that feeling extends to a lot of our IT team members, related to a number of the Azure features we now have access to.”
Greater gains to come
The Metrie team credits not just Azure, SAP, or Qnovate for its successful transition, but rather how they have worked together with all three. “In the Quality Triangle, there are inherent tradeoffs in cost, project speed, and performance,” says Taylor. “Usually, you get to pick two as your benefits. With SAP on Azure and Qnovate, we got to have all three.” The company’s sales desk has already seen a 25 percent increase in the speed of major transactions, which was a key pain point prior to Metrie’s move to Azure. And for customers who need the sales team to look up product specifics or other data, call times have fallen by as much as 66 percent.
The benefits of this speed increase, which Metrie has experienced across its whole SAP landscape, extend to multiple internal teams as well. This increases employee morale for both customer-facing teams and internal groups. “We recently did a disaster recovery test and a disk space increase, and the speed at which those actions were completed is amazing,” says Kane. “You blink and it’s done in Azure.”
With SAP as the last, most crucial element of its cloud migration, Metrie is poised to gain even more benefits in the years and months to come. “Azure is always innovating,” says Crichton. “We’re looking forward to the ability to implement hot patching within our Azure infrastructure, which will reduce our productivity losses from updates practically to zero. I don’t think we’d be able to gain that kind of benefit with anyone else.” Metrie is also looking into SAP data archiving and the potential for gaining new insights from that data.
Metrie’s infrastructure is now poised to meet the company’s rapidly growing needs. “We have regained the control we saw the company slowly losing,” says Taylor. “Having strong advisors to guide us to this point has been crucial, as has the knowledge that we’re building our new functionalities in the right place with Azure.”
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“In the past, when we wanted to update or change our infrastructure, the process could take several weeks. With Azure, we can now make those changes in a matter of hours.”
Will Crichton, Director of IT Operations, Metrie
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