Coats stays agile and responsive under any conditions with Microsoft solutions

As the world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer, Coats makes products that touch nearly all aspects of daily life, from airbags to teabags, and the company has been in business for 260 years. During that time, Coats has made many technology transformations to survive and thrive, and the company continues to take a forward-looking approach to IT and explore new developments like cloud computing.

Coats has invested heavily in digital technologies to keep up with demand for its products while maintaining the highest quality standards and minimizing its environmental footprint. Whether that means fine-tuning its thread-winding machines using Microsoft Internet of Things (IoT) technologies or moving its SAP landscape from on-premises datacenters to Microsoft Azure, Coats always looks for ways to lead with technology.

“Coats has a digital-first, cloud-first company vision,” says Helge Brummer, Vice President of Technology and Operations at Coats. “That approach has rejuvenated what was a very traditional business up until a few years ago. We’ve used Azure as the vehicle to deliver more than 150 different cloud services that serve as the foundation for our ideas and innovations for the future.”

SAP solutions play a central role in the Coats application ecosystem. Coats uses them to manage its supply chain, controlling orders and streamlining processes that turn ordered goods into finished goods. The company also uses SAP solutions to handle its enterprise resource planning (ERP) along with its sales and procurement operations. Now that Coats runs its SAP solutions on Azure, the company can take the things it has always done well and do them even better.

“With Azure, we have the horsepower we need to hold to our timelines and get products through the manufacturing floor in an efficient manner,” explains Brummer. “In some situations, the results have been dramatic. For example, sampling orders—which are an important part of customer decision-making—used to take 10 to 14 days to process. With the agility of the cloud, we’ve cut that to two days.”

For more information about the Coats SAP migration, read this story. For more details about the use of IoT technologies at Coats, read this story.

Responding to a global crisis with cloud flexibility

The agility and flexibility of the cloud were important factors when Coats needed to respond to business changes triggered by COVID-19. Like all businesses, Coats was affected by product demand changes and the need to close sites because of local and national government regulations. Having already moved to Azure, Coats didn’t have a vast physical IT infrastructure to worry about.

“With Azure, we have the flexibility to scale our landscape up or down to meet our immediate needs, and that’s a vital capability during our COVID-19 response,” says Brummer. “Maintaining cash flow is essential because we want to retain as many employees as we can, and scaling our Azure consumption helps us maintain a strong balance sheet. It also means we can easily scale back up when production returns to normal.”

Coats has also used other Microsoft technologies to keep the business running during this time. “Because we implemented a modern workplace with Microsoft 365, all of the files and information that the business needs are in the cloud,” says Brummer. “With Microsoft technologies, Coats has remained operational, regardless of whether employees are at the company or working remotely.”

Adds Kevin Givens, Head of Supply Chain at Coats North America, “Microsoft Teams is my new best friend. With Teams calls, Teams chat, and Teams groups, I can share files, information, and best practices with colleagues around the globe. And with SAP in the cloud, I can easily get information about inventory anywhere in the world and respond to any mandated shutdowns.”

By consolidating everything in Azure, Coats has been able to respond quickly to factory closures in countries hit hard by COVID-19, redirecting resources from one location to another. “It helps that we have a global footprint, so there are multiple locations where we can produce goods,” says Brummer. “But that would be meaningless if all the data were locked up at those locations. Being in the cloud is what keeps us up and running.”

Adds Givens, “Without the combination of SAP and Azure, we would have been much slower to react and implement changes to support our customers. But with those technologies, we are able to do the right thing for our employees and customers and maintain business continuity.”

Delivering much-needed protective equipment in a hurry

Social responsibility plays an important part in Coats’s corporate mission, and the company continually looks for ways to further important causes and initiatives that help better the world. As part of its response to COVID-19, Coats joined the Gerber PPE Task Force that works with manufacturers to switch their facilities to producing personal protective equipment (PPE) for first responders and frontline medical workers.

Coats has the necessary threads and yarns in its normal portfolio of products—the company just needed to adjust production to focus on those materials. “Being in Azure gives us the flexibility to proactively align our supply chain to produce essential PPE materials and get them where they’re needed,” says Brummer.

As a thread manufacturer, Coats works with a broad global network of customers, which puts it in an excellent position to help the task force by matching demand with suppliers to help expedite the production and distribution of PPE. Coats has also used its expert knowledge of sewing and garment creation to help its task force partners with PPE creation.

“We know how to produce high-quality garments at an optimized cost, so we created PPE libraries with patterns and cutting processes for masks, hats, gowns, coveralls, and scrubs,” says Keith Fenner, Managing Director at Coats Digital. “We shared those with our customers who were transitioning to PPE creation and that got them going right away, when it might have taken them months otherwise.”

For Brummer, efforts like this are just standard practice for Coats. “We know there are nurses, firefighters, and other essential workers who need to have more gear that needs to be washed more often, so it must be sturdy and well-constructed,” he says. “Helping provide PPE is all part of the spirit of Coats, which is about going above and beyond and doing the right thing for individuals and for the greater good.”

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