Azerbaijani food conglomerate, Azersun Holding, revamps performance with Azure and M365

Azersun Holding, one of Azerbaijan’s oldest conglomerates, operates in industries like food production, retail, farming, oil and gas, banking, and construction. The company goes above and beyond to safeguard human health and offer an outstanding service, acting as a trailblazer. “Our main goal is to drive traditional business models in Azerbaijan to Industry 4.0,” explains Hakan Figenli, the CIO at Azersun Holding.

Almost three years ago, Azersun Holding was contemplating a move to the cloud. The goal was to ensure business safety and security, team collaboration, communication and efficiency, and to enable remote work. “Everyone was working from the office and favoring face-to-face meetings, and this exhausted so much time,” remembers Figenli. “When I first brought this vision to the executive board, the main concern was the security and performance of the cloud. Today we see that cloud is more cost-efficient, more secure and faster than our legacy systems.”

Azersun Holding started one of the biggest Azure digital migration operations in Azerbaijan with the help of implementation partner Mayasoft. With its global expertise in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Modern Work solutions, and as Microsoft's direct CSP partner, Mayasoft provided analysis of project needs, creation of architectural designs, cost optimizations, implementation of the project and operation of systems related managed services in the production phase.

Bringing flexibility and efficiency to remote teams

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team had to accelerate Azersun’s digital transformation. “Bringing a new culture to Azersun Holding started with Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams brought great value by enabling us to record, review, and share documents online. These tools were easily adopted by our staff, adding flexibility to our business, in a week” says Figenli. “In just the last three months, we held more than 3,000 meetings in Teams, with a total meeting time of about 12,300 hours,” adds Tayfur Böler, the IT Infrastructure Manager at Azersun Holding. Multiple team members could collaborate on the same file with Office 365, making it feel like they were back in the office. During the pandemic, the entire team worked from home, with more than 4,000 employees active on the Microsoft 365 platform. Thanks to Exchange Online for email, Microsoft security patch updates also took a load off the IT department. Microsoft 365 is enabled with multi-factor authentication and active threat protection, which helped the IT team minimize security gaps.  

The biggest change for Azersun Holding came when the team migrated its retail POS systems to Azure. “We did our Proof of Concept in retail. With support of Microsoft, about 1,000 stores were migrated to Azure quickly and at a low cost,” explains Figenli. “We have gained a major performance advantage. Earlier, sending sales data from our 1,000 stores to SAP took three hours. Now it takes 15 minutes. Sending price notices to the cash registers took one hour, now it takes half the time. The Azure server is four times faster than the on-premises server. Our IT costs have shrunk by 23 percent, and we need a quarter of the hardware. We are grateful that we had a reliable partner like Mayasoft in such a crucial configuration,” Figenli adds.

Paving the way to the cloud

After the successful POS migration, the team is now working on migrating SAP systems to Azure. “We operate all our production line enterprise resource planning on SAP S/4Hana. 70 percent of our business units work with SAP systems,” explains Figenli. “Fully migrating to Azure will add great value. We have already started to use Ariba for procurement and supply chain collaboration and SuccessFactors for human capital management on the cloud, and all our in-house applications are also hosted on Azure.”

Figenli sees the move as a great step forward. “By migrating the data, we will reduce the burden on our data center, and our IT team will be able to focus on safety and cybersecurity. We have also invested in Power BI for reporting and analytics. The cloud is now our one and only solution. We are working hand-in-hand with Microsoft on this journey.”     

As a true trailblazer, Azersun Holding is confident that other companies in Azerbaijan and the region will follow suit, creating a butterfly effect. “It’s a small community here, and our Microsoft and SAP journey is followed closely. We want to develop Azersun Holding in a competitive environment, and we want to bring technology and innovation to the heart of this country,” says Figenli. “If this path is followed by other companies, we will be very happy.”