The Adani Group’s Cement Business achieves reliability, scalability, and improved performance with Microsoft Azure

Quest for greater reliability and improved performance

When the Adani Group acquired Ambuja Cements Limited and ACC Limited, the SAP implementations had to be integrated with its systems. The existing technology platform, with ad-hoc systems and interim licensing, was inadequate for the infrastructure giant’s 24x7x365 operations. It was also unable to support 19TB of critical business data, apart from the additional workloads. It lacked high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities.

The Adani Group was already making progress on Microsoft Azure, utilizing Azure Data Lake and Azure Synapse Analytics. The capabilities of Microsoft Azure aligned with the Group’s digitization goals. Its positive experience with solutions using Microsoft products and working with the Microsoft team prompted the Adani Group to transition its operations to Azure cloud.

Transforming operations and ensuring stability

The solutioning involved many challenges, such as integrating multiple processes, managing enormous databases, and addressing the impending expiry of licenses of existing products within six months. Additionally, any downtime could create repercussions for business operations. For instance, the system is crucial for processes relating to the shipping of output, and a system downtime would halt shipping, leading to a significant impact. The Cement Business would then have to halt the manufacturing process. This would prove very difficult as cement manufacturing involves high temperatures, which take two days to set up. An interruption in the manufacturing operations would also result in significant energy and cost losses. Therefore, it was critical to avoid or minimize downtime as far as possible.

The collaborative effort of teams from the Adani Group’s Cement Business, Microsoft, IBM, and SAP proved instrumental in overcoming these hurdles. A team of 50-60 individuals worked as one unit to design and implement the solution to modernize the technical ecosystem of the business. They began by migrating all operations and the databases to Microsoft Azure and set up the old system as the DR solution. They then upgraded to SAP HANA on Azure, established an additional Azure system for HA and DR, and successfully launched the new system. The entire project was completed in less than four months, with approximately two months dedicated to the migration to SAP HANA on Azure.

Mr. Hemal Shah, Chief Digital Officer, Cement Business, Adani Group, says, "With the deadline for going live set for the last week of November, we were racing against time. However, the teams stepped up to the challenge and implemented the new solution successfully, ahead of schedule, in the first week of November. The icing on the cake was that they were able to take a well-deserved break for Diwali without requiring us to shut down major processes. The time and effort spent in design and architecture were well worth it."

SAP HANA on Azure is used by around 4,500 users, while thousands of others use it indirectly. As the nerve center of its operations, it has helped the Cement Business achieve its objectives of stability, reliability, and improved performance:

• Business operations are smoother. The HA and DR capabilities ensure minimal disruption and allow the enterprise to scale up resources quickly based on demand.
• Running SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure has improved system reliability and performance, leading to faster processing times and nearly eliminating slowdowns. This has resulted in satisfied end-users and increased operational efficiency, which translates directly into business stability.
• Faster and more reliable systems performance has significantly enhanced the user experience.
• The integration of SAP systems from three newly acquired companies into the new solution was smooth, demonstrating the system's robustness and scalability.

Mr. Ajay Kapur, CEO, Cement Business, Adani Group, says, “The collaboration between the various teams coupled with their technical and business expertise ensured a speedy and successful implementation. The benefits derived from the solution and the acknowledgement of the project’s success by key stakeholders validate the team’s commitment to excellence and innovation.”

Shaping the future with a strategic digital roadmap

With a stable, secure, and modern solution in place, the Adani Group is focused on further enhancing its digital ecosystem to be future-ready. Sudipta Bhattacharya, CEO, Adani Group (North America), and CTO, Adani Group, shares, “As we strive for continuous improvement and innovation, we are exploring ways to leverage technology to optimize our processes and database. We recently went live with a pilot Customer Relationship Management (CRM) project on Microsoft Dynamics 365, and we aim to take it further. Additionally, we have started working on generative AI use cases using Microsoft solutions.”