Carhartt gains business agility, supports rapid business growth with SAP solutions on Azure and Teams

A legendary brand starts a new chapter

Since 1889, Carhartt has produced distinctive, high-quality workwear for people who do hard jobs in tough conditions. Today, the iconic Carhartt label can be found in railyards, farms, construction sites, and even skate parks around the world. The company is still owned and managed by descendants of its founder, Hamilton Carhartt, to ensure that every garment it makes stays true to his commitment to exceptional quality, innovative design, and outstanding durability and comfort.

In recent years, Carhartt has started to evolve its traditional wholesale business model by integrating online sales and retail stores to increase its direct sales. In 2010, the company installed and hosted the SAP Apparel and Footwear Solution in its own datacenters. To support its business growth, Carhartt needed to replace the heavily customized on-premises SAP R/3 environment with a stable, scalable SAP S/4HANA infrastructure running in the cloud. The company chose S/4HANA for Fashion and Vertical Business to underpin its transformation from multichannel to omnichannel.

“Carhartt is a fast-growing business these days, and we wanted to upgrade our SAP systems to keep pace with our evolving IT requirements,” says Bryan Laszlo, Infrastructure Systems Manager at Carhartt. “Originally, we looked at upgrading SAP on-premises, but the cost of the infrastructure we were likely to need was pretty prohibitive.”

So, to gain the elasticity and reliability that it needed to accommodate rapid business growth, Carhartt implemented SAP on Microsoft Azure to run business-critical SAP environments on Azure resources.

“We wanted to improve our velocity by using SAP on Azure, but it wasn’t just a technical move,” says John Hill, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of Business Planning at Carhartt. “We re-engineered all of our business processes as part of this transformation to enable us to double our revenue over a five-year period. It’s all about making everything frictionless, for our employees and for our customers—and SAP on Azure will be a big part of that.”

An expert partner drives rapid implementation

After deciding to move its SAP environments to the cloud, Carhartt evaluated several vendors’ offerings before choosing Azure. “We investigated multiple platforms, but Azure had the feature set we were looking for,” says Laszlo. This aligned with the company’s long-term strategy of getting out of the datacenter business and moving workloads to the cloud. Carhartt chose Azure for its maturity in the enterprise cloud market and an already well-developed relationship built on the company’s wide use of Microsoft solutions, particularly in the areas of productivity, collaboration, and data.

Carhartt worked with Microsoft and KochaSoft—a member of the Microsoft Partner Network and a specialist in optimizing SAP technology in the cloud—to implement its SAP S/4HANA systems on Azure. These systems included SAP Customer Activity Repository, SAP Process Orchestration, and SAP Landscape Transformation. The transformation project included building a complete Commvault-based backup solution for the new SAP environments, Azure NetApp Files for high-performance file storage, and Azure Load Balancer to optimize application availability and performance.

By working closely with KochaSoft, Carhartt was able to deploy its retail environments on Azure in just four months. These included its sandbox, development, production, and disaster recovery environments plus three QA landscapes. “KochaSoft has proven time and again to be a great partner to us, and I can’t imagine doing this without them,” says Laszlo. “Even when we added more environments to the scope of the project, they still delivered ahead of our original schedule.”

Carhartt is now collaborating with KochaSoft on deploying its much larger wholesale and e-commerce environments on Azure. And Carhartt plans to scale its SAP environment capacity from an initial 500 gigabytes to 6 terabytes for seamless scalability as it expands its cloud presence.

The right tools help to handle disruption

When the COVID-19 crisis emerged, it could have thrown the project off course, but using Microsoft 365, particularly Microsoft Teams, Carhartt was able to keep the project running smoothly. Already working in Teams, Carhartt IT and business staff were prepared to quickly start working remotely. They opened instant messaging chats for up to 70 testers and their IT and business partners, held daily stand-ups, extensive design workshops, and training walkthroughs with Teams meetings, and tracked project progress using Microsoft Project and Teams channels—all in a single location, from anywhere that people chose to sign in.

“We managed every phase of this project in Teams, and thank goodness we did,” says Jenny Hall, Director of Project Catalyst and Carhartt’s business transformation lead. “The fact that we’ll be going live with our wholesale environments a few months from now while working entirely remotely is because we’re using Teams.”

Although Carhartt used Teams to help it cope with the disruption caused by COVID-19, the company expects to see long-term benefits too. Streamlined processes, more complete data visibility, and the ability to collaborate and make fast decisions will help Carhartt’s business units, from its manufacturing facilities to its stores, work more efficiently and effectively. For example, regional and store managers are using Teams to hold remote conference meetings. “By using Teams, we’re prepared for whatever comes next,” says Hall. “We’ll be able to respond quickly to changing consumer behavior and continue to build on our heritage of product innovation.”

A stable, scalable environment sustains business agility

Using SAP on Azure, Carhartt can now scale its systems elastically to meet changing needs. It has also eliminated the business disruption caused by outages in its on-premises SAP environments. With more stable and scalable environments for its business-critical SAP systems, Carhartt now has the agility and responsiveness that it needs to support its business transformation.

“Our SAP HANA environments sprawl very fast, which means we must have that agility,” says Tim Masey, Vice President, IT Infrastructure & Security at Carhartt. “The memory and CPU requirements are so high that we just couldn’t respond fast enough in our old on-premises environments. Using SAP on Azure, we now have the ability to move fast and cope with that sprawl.”

Moving to the cloud has also signaled a shift in Carhartt’s datacenter cost model from CAPEX to OPEX. This means more visibility into how much the organization is spending, and that insight helps the team maximize the value of its cloud investment in the coming years. In the long term, the cloud could represent a major savings over managing the company’s own datacenters.

“With SAP on Azure, we can keep pace with what the company needs, which is helping us get out of the datacenter business and shift our focus onto helping Carhartt become stronger,” says Laszlo.

“Availability is also critical,” he adds. “Our SAP systems have to be there—they have to keep working. We’ve had outages in on-premises systems, but everything in Azure has just kept going, so we haven’t had any disruption in those environments.”

Transformation and growth

By moving its entire SAP estate onto Azure, Carhartt will gain the agility and scalability to provide frictionless experiences for its customers. “The bottom line is we want to make sure we’re delighting our customers, whether they’re retail or wholesale,” says Laszlo. “With the flexibility and elasticity we get from using Azure, the infrastructure team can move faster, which means the business can move faster. We’re not focused on managing systems, which gives us time to be better partners to the business—and that makes the business able to serve our customers better.”

And as it continues to transform and increase its global business, Carhartt plans to extend its use of Azure. “The great thing about Azure is it’s all over the world,” says Laszlo. “We can put our resources where our people are, instead of having to bring everything back to our datacenters in Michigan. So, we’re evaluating every workload to see if now is the right time to bring it onto Azure.”

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