400% Business Growth Facilitated by an Azure Cloud Migration

The Challenge Story

In rapidly evolving and competitive industries, acquisitions to broaden organizational skills, Geographic reach and revenue is not an uncommon tactic to secure growth. The key to ensuring success in these ventures is executing seamless integration of all system, assets, etc. Without the proper processes and technological foundation, gaining insight into performance and operations can be difficult and time consuming, limiting the growth potential in the long run.

A Canadian-based IoT and Logistics company was embarking on a multi-year strategy designed to grow their global business by 4X anchored in an aggressive acquisition strategy to further their capabilities and market share.  They operated throughout Europe with 500+ employees delivering fleet management solutions to logistics clients.  Their focus is centered on vehicle tracking route optimization, safety and compliance to name a few.  To retain operational efficiency and organizational effectiveness, systems migration and information integration needed to be consolidated within their current technology stack.  This complicated and cumbersome process took anywhere between 6 to 12 months, significantly impeding their ability for additional acquisition and meeting growth objectives.

Our client needed to transition from their environment, which was a mix of Windows 2012 and SQL Server 2012, to a hybrid cloud and modern digital estate to efficiently integrate their planned corporate expansions. The platform had to be stood up quickly, scaled dynamically, and built efficiently. This included new cloud platforms (CRM, ERP, Data Integration, Data Governance, Analytics, Reporting, etc.), existing on-premises platforms (help desk, Marketing, etc.) and third-party SaaS applications (Vin registrations, etc.)

Our client needed a partner to fully implement their modern data estate in an accelerated timeline to ensure success of their implementation.

Solution

Adastra developed a strategy, that revolved around Azure, to consolidate our client’s segregated back-office systems.  These segregated systems impeded visibility into their finance and operations, drove inaccurate outputs and was an overall strain on their staff. Through a series of consultations and design workshops, Adastra demonstrated the interoperability of Dynamics 365 business applications and impressed on our client that Azure was undeniably the right platform on which to host their full business ecosystem.

Microsoft and Adastra worked together to co-develop the best solution and capabilities to meet and scale their architecture worldwide, including regional redundancies, standardize processing and align policies and regulations. Adastra migrated 140 VM’s to Azure, rehosting majority of the VM’s and refactoring mission critical SQL Server VMs to SQL Managed Instance. The hybrid cloud environment successfully integrated cloud native, on premise, and SaaS applications, through Azure data integration services and provided full visibility into global finance and operations, reporting at all levels and real time tracking of inventory and sales pipeline.

In parallel, we implemented an MDM solution leveraging Adastra’s Ataccama on Azure, which integrated and synchronized the master data between enterprise systems holding both customer and contact data. With the program in place, our client’s data was secure, recoverable, monitored, and stable.

Impact

The consolidated platform cut the time to integrate new systems from upwards of a year to 4 weeks. Further, it provided a streamlined sales channel for both partners and channel managers with reliable and integrated customer and contact information; offering seamless order integration and processing as well as data enablement through self-service BI.

Further, the client achieved reliable customer and contact master data in all connected systems, which was critical for the business operations. Data is automatically synchronized and validated to ensure high quality and consistency throughout the organization.

Learn more about our Azure Migration Services.