UFA modernizes vital retail and fueling solutions with SAP on Azure

Founded in 1909, United Farmers of Alberta Co-operative Limited (UFA) is one of Canada’s largest and most dynamic cooperatives. Over the years, the business has grown from a small-scale, local cooperative into an extensive commercial and retail organization with more than 110,000 active members. A progressive and diversified business, UFA is proud to provide the products, services, and solutions its owners and customers need to successfully run their operations. UFA has 35 farm and ranch stores throughout Alberta and more than 100 petroleum agencies. These petroleum agencies constitute the largest Cardlock network in Alberta and offer UFA members and customers round-the-clock access to fuel every day of the year.   

UFA is no stranger to innovation and is constantly looking for ways to modernize its solutions to better serve its customers. Ten years ago, that meant adopting an on-premises SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Over the years, however, the database for that solution eventually reached its six-terabyte capacity. Performance issues, including with fuel reconciliation reports at the cooperative’s fuel agencies, began to crop up. “We maintain internal credit for our customers,” says Mathew Alves, Manager of Development and Integration at UFA. “That is one of our core SAP business processes. Every Tuesday, when our fuel agencies simultaneously reconciled their fuel levels, it completely disrupted the system that controls customer credit and allows us to pump fuel.”   

During this period, while UFA was weighing how to best address the SAP issue, the concept of adopting Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations also came up. With Dynamics 365, the organization could finally modernize its retail spaces and point-of-sale solutions. Syncing Dynamics 365 to its existing SAP infrastructure would mean more than 200 real-time connections between the two ERPs, something that the on-premises infrastructure couldn’t manage in its current state. To quickly resolve its performance issues, and to create a scalable environment better suited for Dynamics 365, UFA opted to move to the cloud. Because the organization knew it needed to eliminate latency between Dynamics 365 and its SAP ERP, both solutions were moved to the same Microsoft Azure datacenter. “With SAP on Azure, we have the capacity and agility to quickly adopt the solutions we need today while simultaneously laying the groundwork for our future initiatives,” says Mr. Alves.  

Orchestrating a swift, effective transition 

The migration to Azure would need to be swift for UFA to meet its internal deadlines. To keep to its timeline, UFA teamed up with the cloud migration experts at Qnovate, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network. Qnovate helped UFA migrate all of its SAP workloads to Azure, assuring that no unforeseen issues came up during the process. The entire migration process, which included planning and identifying the proper go-live window, took six weeks, with the actual rollout taking place over a single weekend.   

“Having a collaborator like Qnovate, with its expertise in running SAP in the cloud, made a massive difference,” says Mr. Alves. “We could discuss our needs at an expert level, right from the beginning. Having that camaraderie and professionalism probably saved us months of the analysis and back-and-forth that would have resulted from working with a less skilled partner.” Working together, Mr. Alves’s team and Qnovate quickly mapped the type of SAP infrastructure that UFA required, including the specifications needed in each of its virtual machines (VMs). Qnovate then created the infrastructure in Azure, migrated the company’s data, and handed the solution back to UFA for implementation and customization. “Thanks to our close collaboration with the UFA team, the migration was incredibly seamless for employees,” says Deepak Suri, President of Qnovate. “Their user experience improved on day one of adoption, and we logged a total of zero incident reports related to lost or broken functionalities.”  

Today, UFA operates its materials management, petroleum supply chain, human capital management, and petroleum business solutions using SAP on Azure. Also on Azure is the company’s SAP business warehouse, which includes its data stores and analytics capabilities. Over the course of the migration and subsequent adoption of Dynamics 365, the company’s data footprint has grown exponentially. All told, the company’s SAP data storage footprint now exceeds 70 terabytes. “Our existing infrastructure would not have been able to handle what we do with SAP on Azure today,” says Mr. Alves. “We would have had to completely refresh our hardware. By moving to Azure, we’ve avoided those costs while simultaneously reducing our maintenance costs.”  

Reaping the rewards 

In the few months since UFA migrated to SAP on Azure, the organization already had multiple benefits to report. By using the scalability of the cloud, UFA has made the operational issues of its old system a thing of the past. “Moving to Azure has meant no performance problems, no outages, and we’ve gained the agility to launch new projects quickly and seamlessly,” says Mr. Alves. “To this day, I don’t think half the organization knows we even made the move to the cloud. They just know the system is healthy now.”  

One of the new projects that UFA has already undertaken is myUFA, a customer information portal that connects the company’s Azure storage accounts to cloud-based software to deliver credit statements, invoices, equity documents, tax slips, and detailed purchase reports to its customers. Operating on the company’s past on-premises SAP solution, the development of such a solution would have taken UFA months, rather than the weeks it took on Azure. Over the next year, UFA plans to rebuild the older facets of its SAP landscape to more fully take advantage of SAP on Azure. “We’ve gained a lot of flexibility and agility with our SAP instance by having it in Azure,” says Mr. Alves. “To support the development of our Dynamics 365 initiative, we had to refresh a number of our environments multiple times. Processing the data volumes of those refreshes used to take us three weeks. The most recent one took us three days, thanks to our ability to scale up the Azure VM we’re using during the process.” 

In just six weeks, UFA transitioned from having an at-capacity, on-premises infrastructure to housing its considerable SAP estate in the cloud. With Azure, the organization has eliminated its existing performance problems, increased scalability, and gained the agility that it needs to launch its next generation of services. “If you’re looking to migrate your own SAP workloads to Azure, my advice is not to overthink it,” says Mr. Alves. “The cloud may seem like this new, intimidating thing, but if you know how to maintain an on-premises infrastructure, you can do the same in the cloud, and you’ll be glad you did.” 

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