By Laura Hyde |
American multinational consumer goods corporation Procter & Gamble (P&G) has achieved around 40 per cent average performance improvements by migrating its SAP systems to Microsoft Azure. The move has also led to faster financial close cycles and quicker backend processing.
P&G’s move to the cloud was necessary to safeguard the continuity of its operations. The multiyear transformation programme, known as ‘Phoenix’, involved moving more 60 SAP production systems from a third-party managed hosting environment (a mix of Unicode and non-Unicode ECC systems) to Azure. The programme was designed to modernise architecture and resiliency at scale, improve performance and strengthen the foundation of some of the company’s most critical systems.
“We wanted to strengthen our cyber and operational resiliency,” said Paola Lucetti, senior vice president and global chief technology officer at Procter & Gamble. “We wanted to improve disaster recoverability. And we wanted to move beyond managed hosting models, which were limiting our agility. Our goal was to keep the business experience stable while making significant improvements. Confidence came from preparation and proof, not just intent.”
P&G evaluated Azure cloud carefully over several years, before partnering with Microsoft through planning, engineering, testing and execution. Phoenix migrations began in April 2023, and adopted a phased approach across more than 60 SAP production systems to ensure business continuity. The less critical systems were migrated first, with the lessons learned applied to the more critical workloads.
“The phased approach really let us address the highest priority first while keeping the business stable,” said Lei Zhu, vice president of SAP at Procter & Gamble. “We first built a secure and resilient foundation on Azure and reduced the immediate infrastructure risk without changing the user experience. That created a stronger platform for longer-term SAP modernisation and future innovation.”
Procter & Gamble is one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, with household brands across five main sectors: beauty, grooming, healthcare, fabric and home care, and baby/feminine/family care
P&G used high-memory Azure virtual machines for its largest SAP workloads, which are especially important for central finance and other memory-intensive applications. The company became the first to collaborate with Microsoft at the engineering stage for these systems and now runs a 32-terabyte SAP central finance environment, described as the largest SAP stock keeping unit currently available on Azure.
“Those very high-memory Azure virtual machines were essential for our largest and more demanding SAP workloads,” Zhu says. “Their high-memory capacity, strong input/output performance, and newer processor technologies helped improve performance significantly for our business applications.”
P&G designed its SAP environment on Azure with both high availability and disaster recovery in mind. This approach was intended to reduce downtime risk and support operational continuity, with Azure Site Recovery becoming integral to supporting replication and recovery across primary and secondary regions for many SAP workloads. The firm worked with Microsoft to improve recovery capabilities as even short disruptions can affect global manufacturing, supply chain and finance. The improvements led to P&G cutting recovery time from two hours to one hour for its most critical workloads.
The move to Azure also gave P&G a more standardised global platform for SAP infrastructure, which enabled it to apply more consistent security standards, operational practices and monitoring across multiple regions (including North America, Europe and Asia).
“Programmes of this size and scale can only succeed when there is strong alignment and strong partnership,” Lucetti says. “This has been a very complex project for us and a major overhaul. It required a lot of discipline, a lot of meticulous preparation, and outstanding partnership. Now that we have a strong SAP foundation on Azure, we can focus on the next steps. That includes using AI more effectively and widely to improve operations, increase automation, and simplify support for our teams and users.”
Read the full story on the Microsoft Customer Stories website.