Aqua Dynamics has been in the manufacturing industry for past 30 years becoming the world’s leading manufacturer in action sports equipment. Their clientele expands from Europe and across worldwide, becoming the world’s most versatile action sport companies. Their business goals are to expand their business operations through multi-disciplinary technologies combined with the latest manufacturing technologies. However, as they expanded their business catering across multiple continents, they needed to restructure their manufacturing process and equipment monitoring hence, needed to solve issues relating to their current manufacturing and monitoring process.
- Feasible solution to monitor and improve the quality of their manufacturing process to ensure integrity.
- Invest in a cost-effective ERP system for long term results.
- Ensure business continuity through disaster recovery (DR)
- Secure data and comply with data privacy standards.
- Improve total cost of ownership (TCO), maintenance and operating costs on hardware, servers and licenses that were predominantly on-premises and limit their workforce capability to work remotely when the need arises.
- Leadership team wanted to implement a long-term digital transformation roadmap to improve processes and deliver excellent customer service across the continents.
Moving to Office 365, Power BI, and SAP on Azure
Aqua Dynamics partnership with Tech One has started over two years ago, through upgrading their Office licenses. The company has set a long-term roadmap to fully migrate on O365 with almost 193 employees now on Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Business Essentials, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Power BI Pro. The company is planning to expand their digital transformation journey by this shift to O365. With Power BI, they were able to transform the management reporting from a simple excel to a dashboard system making data come life and easier to understand.
Within past two years, Tech One has conducted over 10 sessions for adoption and change management (ACM) which enabled:
- Senior management to fully grasp and utilize Teams and O365 apps for collaboration and productivity (BDM Workshops)
- User trainings on Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and O365 productivity apps (Teams adoption workshops). These workshops were conducted by MVPs from Tech One and in the region (see attachment for photos)
- IT admin trainings on infrastructure and security components to simplify IT management.
- Enabling townhall meetings with their management team through Microsoft Teams
- Enable a more secure workplace through MFA.
- Achieve larger storage capacity on mailbox and OneDrive and create backup for files.
- Achieve higher productivity through this central hub for collaboration.
- Enabling remote-work setup during the lockdown
“As one of the leading manufacturing companies in the action sport industry, we wanted to establish a concrete digital transformation roadmap. We are an openminded team that constantly aim to improve our internal systems to deliver better customer service. Close to one year we evaluated multiple ERP systems along with testing prototypes. However, Investing in SAP hosted on Azure cannot be any better decision. In the long run we are only paying for what we use” Said Lanka Koralegedara, Head of Management Information Systems
By moving to cloud, Aqua Dynamics further allied their DR strategy by transitioning some of their public facing business apps such as their in house-built software, Local Website (IIS), Website Database, and their ERP system, SAP as well. Initially, the team considered scaling their business applications on-premises by investing in hardware to host the applications locally however, upon reviewing a cost-benefit analysis which included dependencies such as, hardware, redundancy, and maintenance, they were convinced to move all the workloads to Microsoft Azure.
Through Azure IaaS they moved to three Virtual Machines, the company is able to use this cloud environment for:
- Move from Capex to an Opex model without an initial large investment.
- Eliminate hardware, redundancy, and maintenance dependencies.
- Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), maintenance, and operating costs of in-house data center infrastructure by 24% versus on-premises.
- Have a more cost-effective solution with Azure’s pay-as-you-go model for scaling business and customer-facing applications.
- Achieve high availability of these apps amidst COVID-19.
- Enable DR, secure customer data and comply with data privacy.
Lanka further added that “We want to further expand our digital transformation journey. In the current cloud infrastructure, we are secured and are able to do more than what we used to. There was significant increase in productivity and efficiency from our team. While the management has a clear overview of the entire process”
Seeing the benefits of their current digital transformation journey, Aqua Dynamics is now in consultation with Tech One to move to Document Management service to eliminate their physical papers and enable a cloud based HRIS system to provide a better service to their employees.
