Case Study: Coats achieves agile global manufacturing and accelerated analytics with Microsoft Azure

Thread manufacturer Coats spins its future in the cloud

Coats, the world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer with roots back to the 1750s and some 60 factories worldwide, faced fragmented operations and aging IT—Lotus Notes email, slow SAP reporting, long server provisioning times, and limited global e-commerce and collaboration capabilities. The company needed to become data-driven to unify manufacturing visibility, speed decision-making, and support rapid global growth, particularly in markets such as China.

Coats moved core systems to Microsoft cloud services—Office 365 for collaboration and Azure (including SAP HANA on Azure, ExpressRoute, Security Center and Intune) with partners Brillio and Axians—creating a lean, scalable datacenter footprint. The transformation cut SAP report times from six hours to six minutes, enabled same-day production planning, provided on-demand test and demo environments, improved global e-commerce performance and security, and paved the way for IoT and predictive analytics pilots to further optimize manufacturing.

Coats

Richard Cammish

CIO