Belimo Automation AG
“A globally stable, high-performance SAP solution in the Azure cloud”
Sven Maushake, CIO
Published: 28.12.2023
The story in brief:
Together with Belimo, Swisscom migrated Belimo’s SAP systems to the cloud in eight months and converted them to SAP S/4HANA at the same time. Thanks to the managed service provided by Swisscom, Belimo can now run its international operations efficiently and reliably around the clock with 24/7 support.
Belimo Automation AG(opens in new tab), headquartered in Hinwil in the canton of Zurich in Switzerland, is the global market leader in the development, production and sale of field devices for the measurement and energy-efficient control of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. Its core business focuses on damper actuators, control valves, sensors and meters.
Updating and expanding the company’s ERP system as its digital backbone is part of Belimo’s strategic growth initiative. Based on a Microsoft cloud assessment, Swisscom evaluated migration as a future-proof solution. The existing SAP solution was migrated to the Azure cloud in a very short space of time with a brownfield approach using a project environment operated by the hyperscaler. In parallel, the existing SAP environment was converted to the innovative SAP S/4HANA. Belimo is now building on the successful migration by implementing its innovation projects on the new system.
Wanted: SAP expertise and a future-proof solution
Belimo previously operated SAP ERP in its own data centre. With its business activities in the US and Asia growing, the company had to equip itself for global, 24/7 operations. This would have been difficult to achieve in the long term with its existing infrastructure: it would have required a massive expansion of the on-premises hardware together with an international operations team to make the extensive system available to around 2,300 employees worldwide.
In order to focus on its core business, Belimo called upon Swisscom’s expertise. Swisscom’s evaluation resulted in a one-to-one migration of SAP ERP, including the SAP HANA database. The entire system, together with other components, was transferred to Microsoft Azure between the beginning of July and the end of November 2022. SAP ERP was then migrated to S/4HANA in a project system.
“After evaluating five different providers, we were convinced that outsourcing the operation of our SAP system to Swisscom and Microsoft Azure is the ideal solution for us.”
Sven Maushake, CIO at Belimo Automation AG
Found: SAP in the Azure cloud, operating globally 24/7
Swisscom set up the new solution in the cloud within a year. To this end, the SAP loads were migrated to Azure in a seamless one-to-one process. A project platform was built using the hyperscaler’s flexible infrastructure, and within one year, the SAP environment, which was running on Windows and Linux servers on-premises, was transferred to this platform and then migrated to SAP S/4HANA in a brownfield conversion.
Today, Belimo uses its extremely high-performance SAP system worldwide 24/7 and can count on reliable operation as part of the managed service provided by Swisscom – including the administration of all Microsoft authorisations. Azure CSP serves as an integrated platform to ensure an optimised end-to-end support process at all times. With the chosen brownfield approach, Belimo was able to cut costs and minimise risks.
By opting for this cutting-edge solution, Belimo has not only future-proofed its diverse business activities across the globe; it has also created the ideal framework for optimising its entire business and digitalising and automating processes. Business value is further increased by having the optimum set-up already in place for new innovation projects – such as creating a data lake, advanced analytics applications, smart factory processes, or implementing intelligent interaction with its customers and integrating IoT into the SAP system.
“The migration to the new system from the MS Azure cloud went smoothly and nobody noticed the change.”
Richard Brändli, SAP Sourcing Sales at Swisscom