Yusen Logistics boosts its IT power with Microsoft Azure

Business challenges and digital transformation drivers

Traditional freight companies have heavy asset costs, such as warehouses, transportation, and employees, and because they’re often subject to market uncertainties, they typically resist change. Because of this, Yusen Logistics hoped to innovate its enterprises management through digitization to support decision making through data mining and adapt to market changes through rapid, agile, and iterative application development to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Based on these considerations, Yusen Logistics first needed to liberate the digital core of its enterprise from traditional on-premises assets, taking advantage of the natural flexibility of cloud computing and the relative traceability of costs and improving management efficiency and cost control.

Azure landing zone and SAP workloads in the cloud

Comprehensively examining the functions of the cloud, the resources provided, the cloud service capabilities, and the security, reliability, flexibility, and other factors of the cloud, Microsoft Azure has become the most consistent platform for overall IT development and business development at Yusen Logistics. Azure is also the company’s landing zone and its SAP infrastructure as a service platform in the cloud.

Yusen Logistics’ cloud infrastructure includes Azure landing zone design and SAP S/4HANA and Business Warehouse (BW) systems development, testing, and production environment. It also includes the underlying resources required for deploying networks, firewalls, web application firewalls (WAFs), network security group configurations, SAP application clusters, database clusters, Azure Backup, and more. Partner Nanyang Wanbang is responsible for completing the underlying design and delivery of the infrastructure, and the Suzhou Xintai Yihe Synnax Company handles the SAP system migration work. With strong technical support by the Microsoft team across SAP and Azure, multiple parties cooperated to complete the project’s on-schedule and on-budget launch.

Over the course of the project, the service integrity provided by a leading cloud platform like Azure brought Yusen Logistics many benefits, such as the following three examples.

First, in terms of security and reliability, IT teams traditionally need to buy firewalls, WAFs, cybersecurity software, gateways, backup and recovery tools, and now, monitoring tools. The Azure cloud platform has sound services, and even if Yusen Logistics requires other security protection systems or tools, Azure can support them, greatly reducing the effort and cost for the company.

Secondly, in terms of flexibility at the level of underlying resources, whether for horizontal or vertical expansion of SAP data needs, it’s much easier on the Azure platform than in a Yusen Logistics computer room. At the application level, Yusen Logistics' IT team is researching and learning more about platform as a service offerings and low-code development tools in the cloud to get rid of traditional coding and operational and maintenance methods.

From a cost perspective, the sensitivity to cloud costs and elasticity of cloud resources makes Yusen Logistics' cloud costs more advantageous than traditional datacenter expenditures.

High availability, backups, and tailor-made disaster recovery drills turn passive into proactive

Under Microsoft's recommendations for the core S/4HANA system, Yusen Logistics adopted the latest high-availability architecture where the company’s traditional computer room is actually a shared hardware deployment. The two systems in the cloud are a multiple virtual machine, high-availability design where if one machine fails, the other can be activated and started immediately. Additionally, Microsoft has backup services for SAP HANA database raw data, a 15-minute recovery point objective, one-click, point-in-time restoration, and long-term retention to meet stringent compliance and audit requirements.

For geo-redundant storage and locally redundant storage backup services for its S/4 core systems, Yusen Logistics adopted multiple-region backups, and for BW and SAP peripheral systems, it adopted locally redundant storage backups in a single region. Regarding disaster recovery, many multinational branches of foreign companies adopt a very passive approach to disaster recovery drills and require relevant orders or supervision from the head office to carry them out. However, through the design of the Azure landing zone and the SAP migration to Azure, the company carried out active disaster recovery design and drills. This enabled Yusen Logistics China’s IT team to build an active and effective disaster recovery backup drill strategy, mainly to verify resource availability, including technical operation steps, personnel verification of internal IT and partner cooperation with the recovery plan, and finally, verification of business sustainability. Based on the flexible IT architecture brought by the cloud platform, Yusen Logistics China has proactively formulated an annual review and a biennial disaster recovery drill strategy to create a "moat" for enterprise data sustainability.

Azure provides comprehensive support for Yusen Logistics IT innovation

The Yusen Logistics IT team is pleased to be liberated from daily, trivial operations, maintenance, and repetitive work. It’s now more business oriented with more in-depth understanding of organizational needs, and it’s using the most convenient platform tools for innovative application development to truly help business departments improve efficiency, mine data value and make quicker decisions, and even optimize personnel structure.

The various tools in Azure and the operations and maintenance services provided by the Microsoft team are helping Yusen Logistics’ IT team liberate their minds and release their productivity and vitality. In their current work, they can more easily see issues from customers’ points of view and consider the characteristics of their business scenarios or logistics needs. They can then quickly develop corresponding applications that seamlessly integrate into the existing management system, greatly improving business efficiency. In the view of Yusen Logistics’ managers, such a business model can help customers realize its value, and the realization of Yusen Logistics’ own corporate value is also a natural result.

Focusing on multi-product capabilities, Microsoft services empower IT development

In addition to Azure, Yusen Logistics China is also using Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and other Microsoft products, although it’s currently using the group’s resources and also a lot of Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps. These are all software as a service offerings, and Yusen Logistics only needs to open the network to use them. At present, all the financial management reports, business management reports, and dashboards seen by the company’s management are developed through Power BI, which is very flexible.

Power Apps helps Yusen logistics fill a lot of gaps. Many small system requirements aren’t suitable to develop for a large system like SAP, such as daily application processes and other functions. With flexible, low-code development using Power Apps, small programs can be delivered to business teams.

Yusen Logistics is using Power Automate to do automation development, and it’s clearly positioned in the company as a strong supplement to the company’s UiPath products for some uncomplicated automation processes. Microsoft's full-product system helps Yusen Logistics’ IT team and even business teams release the potential of human resources, further simplify management processes and injecting more impetus into enterprise development.

Future expectations

In the face of an uncertain future and continuous real-time updates and technological developments, the Yusen Logistics China team is continuing to maintain technical vigilance and educate itself about the Azure platform’s many capabilities. The company is also sharing Microsoft’s best practices and business scenarios with the logistics industry, and most importantly, it’s helping customers improve their own value and maximize their interests.