Driving experience excellence with SAP on Microsoft Azure

A vision of greater transparency through the product lifecycle

The foundation for McLaren’s manufacturing operations is SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC). The management of operations via SAP is business critical and, given the high value of McLaren manufacturing, an outage of these systems is costed at approx. £250k per day. Reliability, performance and resilience are, therefore, absolute requirements of the underlying infrastructure.

At the same time, McLaren had a vision to bring greater transparency to the end-to-end customer experience. The McLaren team is renowned for its advanced, transformative analytics. It wanted to use this expertise to bring together data from manufacturing, its Microsoft Dynamics CRM and third-party post-sales systems to create a foundation for further transformation.

McLaren saw a move to the cloud as a way to bring greater agility to its business-critical systems and make it possible to use more data in more versatile and innovative ways – to really leverage its value and to create a more joined-up view between design, manufacturing and the post-sales experience.

Choosing to migrate to Microsoft Azure

McLaren’s SAP solution ran on HANA Enterprise Cloud (SAP HEC), a managed, private cloud hosting service for SAP HANA and its related applications provided by SAP. To support its larger data ambitions, however, the McLaren team sought greater versatility and agility.

Microsoft Azure ticked McLaren’s boxes in terms of the relationship between Microsoft and SAP, the availability and resilience of the platform, the inbuilt security and the vast scope for future transformation that Azure delivers.

“We have a really great relationship with Microsoft and we’ve now centred on Azure as our public cloud as choice,” says Paul Griffiths. 

“Azure gave us everything we needed: a proven cloud platform optimised to run our critical SAP applications,” states Rob Raven, Executive Director of Quality at McLaren Automotive, “It’s clear SAP on Azure provides the availability, agility and resiliency we require.”

During 2020, McLaren worked with a Microsoft team to develop a migration plan, drawing on their expertise to create the resilient, highly available architecture McLaren needed. For the first few months, most staff were on furlough so the six-month migration was managed by a very lean team. Nevertheless, the migration was successfully achieved within the planned timescales and without any downtime during the migration.

“Both SAP and Azure are so flexible,” adds Tom Higgins, Technical Services Lead at McLaren Automotive, “And the fact that Azure is SAP’s preferred choice is underlined by our smooth transition.”

Leveraging Azure services for security excellence

Key workloads now run on SAP HANA Certified Virtual Machines on Azure to provide a powerful, scalable infrastructure which provides improved reliability and performance and lower operational costs. 

Resilience is critical for McLaren, so it is making full use of Azure Availability Zones for high availability and to support its disaster recovery strategy. McLaren also leverages Azure ExpressRoute to create a private connection between Azure and its on-premises environment with more reliability, faster speeds and lower latencies than typical Internet connections.

McLaren holds very valuable IP and highly sensitive customer data on its systems, so security is another high priority for the company. 

“We’ve got more control over the network now,” says Paul Griffiths. “Our security is strengthened by the inherent controls that come with Azure services, as well as through the capabilities Azure Firewall, what we’re doing with Azure Application Gateway, Azure Defender for Cloud and a new compliance tool we’ve implemented for SAP on Azure, Azure Monitor for SAP. It could never be this secure if it was on-prem.” 

“Plus, with Azure we retain control over our own security, so we can act quickly,” adds Michael McManus.

Extend and innovate

Now SAP is successfully running in Azure, McLaren is free to leverage all the Azure platform services and their benefits.

“It’s changing the way we operate as an IT department,” states Paul Griffiths, “SAP was implemented as infrastructure as code, and we’re drawing on Azure services as well as common tools such as Terraform and Ansible to manage the applications through code.”

Another new opportunity presented by the move to Azure is the development of cloud-native apps. Paul Griffiths explains, “We are looking at containerising some applications, including the service information system and spare parts catalogue in our after-sales environment.”

Agility brings cost savings

Agility was the other key driver for McLaren’s migration to Microsoft Azure. Now, instead of requiring a change request process with a twelve-week lead time, services can be provisioned rapidly, bringing greater agility to McLaren’s infrastructure. This agility has brought with it significant cost savings, with an expected six-figure annual saving in cloud hosting costs.

“Now, with Azure, we can take advantage of cloud economics; we can right-size systems and easily turn things on and off quickly to optimise our use and costs,” explains Paul Griffiths.

McLaren has made use of Microsoft Azure reserved instances for its production and development systems which are required 24/7. By reserving resources for dedicated use on a one- or three-year basis, McLaren can access costs savings of up to 70 percent. Other environments, which aren’t required 24/7 are spun up and down as needed, to fully optimise cloud savings. 

Paul Griffiths explains, “Our sandbox environments are off the main production transport path and some of our quality analysis systems don’t need to run all the time. On Azure, we’re now able to be much more agile in the way we provision these services.”

Presenting SAP data using Microsoft Power Apps 

McLaren is innovating around its use of additional Microsoft tools too. “We’re starting to use Power Apps more. The use of the whole Power Platform has exploded within McLaren,” explains Paul Griffiths. 

One of the Power Apps developed by the McLaren team was a production system to display TAKT data on big screens on the shopfloor. Paul Griffiths adds, “It allows us to visualise our data in SAP far better.”

The success of the presenting SAP data in Power Apps has led to further Power App innovation elsewhere in the business, including some customer-facing Power Apps for event waiver forms and signing up to marketing communications at McLaren events, such as those hosted at Goodwood. Paul Griffiths adds, “it looks really nice and slick. A customer can just add their data independently when they’re on a stand and that data goes directly into our Microsoft Dynamics CRM.”

Over the next few months, the McLaren team will be developing another of their Power Apps to create a full Quality Management system which will also integrate SAP data.

“As advocates of the wide range of technologies in the Microsoft stack, we can leverage their interoperability to provide greater visibility for the end-to-end vehicle lifecycle,” states Chris Hicks.

Pulling information together in Azure Data Lake

“Looking back, we knew pretty early on that this was the right decision, cost-wise and the freedom of managing our own environment,” advises Michael McManus, “And we’ve been able to build an Azure Data Lake far quicker that we would otherwise have been able because we had that freedom.”

The Azure Data Lake is an essential part of the McLaren vision because it is the environment where data from the various systems will come together. SAP holds the car or product details as it is built and left the factory, including the sales order and spec. McLaren holds its view of the customer and their history of the vehicle as McLaren sees it in Microsoft Dynamics 365. It is bringing in additional data about digital reach – analytics from its own website and social media – to the Azure Data Lake to augment Dynamics 365 customer data. Further, McLaren is now working on ways to pull in additional post-sales information from its dealership network. All of this data will be pulled together in the Azure Data Lake.

Paul Griffiths explains, “Standing up the Azure Data Lake was rapid and very easy because it was all code driven. In terms of the reporting off the back of that, we began with Warranty, which is a mature part of the organisation in terms of reporting, so that was a good place to start.” 

Michael McManus confirms, “We’ve done a huge amount in six months. The speed at which we’ve been able to deliver this wasn’t identified as a benefit when we began looking at Microsoft Azure, but it’s been a happy result.”

Eventually, McLaren vehicle post-sales performance data will also be brought into the Azure Data Lake. Paul Griffiths explains, “Artura will be the first connected vehicle for McLaren – that’s the ultimate goal. When that happens, we’ll have more data back from the vehicle that can drive conversations at the customer level – advising on specs based on usage, scheduling services, or taking a more proactive approach to battery management or predictive maintenance.”

Early success drives greater innovation

McLaren is finding that success breeds ambition. “Once you get a taste for cloud transformation, everyone wants to move a lot more quickly,” says Paul Griffiths, “We’re starting to have conversations about what we can do with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence on Microsoft Azure, although we’re concentrating on getting our data right first.”

Michael McManus concurs, “The Power BI reports drawing on the data in our Azure Data Lake that we’ve created for Warranty and Marketing are now being shared across the whole company, up to board level. I’ve been taken by surprise by the engagement and enthusiasm that has created.” 

McLaren has plans to do great things with this data. Inventory are using it for their KPIs and expect to drive down the company’s inventory position by tens of millions of pounds. Paul Griffiths explains, “That’s all being driven by getting better data.”

Using post-sales data to transform the customer experience 

“SAP now doesn’t experience any downtime which is a big win for a company like ours,” says Rob Raven, “A more fundamental gain is the greater visibility of data. It means we can involve far more of our wider team to analyse customer data and feedback, leading to more improvements. It’s a huge gain for our vehicle warranty performance and our customers’ experience.”

McLaren is now planning to develop a value exchange programme with its network of more than 100 dealerships, in order to improve the two-way flow of data between McLaren manufacturing operations and the post-sales customer experience. This includes presenting information back to dealership through a Microsoft Dynamics 365 portal and sharing leads with retailers. 

“We want to expand this further,” says Paul Griffiths, “and give them APIs to draw data into their systems. Our vision is to make McLaren the easiest motor manufacturer to do business with.”

Chris Hicks concludes, “What we’re seeing is a real step-change in our industry – and it’s a vision that would not have been possible without the technological capabilities SAP offers when combined with the power of Microsoft Azure.”