Case Study: Coats speeds global manufacturing and SAP reporting with Microsoft Azure

Thread manufacturer Coats spins its future in the cloud

Coats, a major UK-based industrial thread manufacturer, faced challenges with its fragmented IT infrastructure and slow, siloed data processing. The company needed to modernize its operations to leverage data intelligence for smarter manufacturing and improved global collaboration. To address this, Coats partnered with Microsoft to adopt its cloud solutions, including Azure and Office 365, aiming to gain scalable processing power and unified communication tools.

Microsoft implemented a comprehensive cloud solution, migrating the majority of Coats' datacenter to Microsoft Azure and deploying Microsoft Office 365 for all employees. This provided the high-performance virtual machines needed to run SAP HANA, which drastically accelerated data processing and reporting. As a result, report generation times were reduced from 6 hours to 6 minutes, enabling same-day production planning and faster customer order fulfillment. Microsoft Azure also provided the secure, scalable infrastructure necessary for global e-commerce expansion and operational flexibility.

Coats

Richard Cammish

CIO