Case Study: Kennametal achieves smart-factory, data-driven insights with Microsoft Power BI

Kennametal backs its smart factories with SAP on Azure

Kennametal, a global manufacturer with nearly 10,000 employees, needed to modernize a sprawling, costly IT landscape that ran critical SAP ERP systems on IBM Power Systems. The company sought better business continuity, faster provisioning, and actionable factory-floor intelligence, and turned to Microsoft technologies—migrating workloads to Azure (including Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Site Recovery, ExpressRoute, and Azure SQL Database) and using Microsoft Power BI for analytics and visualization.

Working with Microsoft, Kennametal replatformed and consolidated three regional datacenters and migrated 3 TB of SAP ERP data to Azure in under 25 hours, automated DR with Azure Site Recovery to meet a three‑hour recovery objective (down from prior multi‑day windows), and moved databases to SQL Server/Azure SQL for easier management. The Azure build improved security, scalability, and deployment speed (new apps in days/weeks vs. months) and enabled machine‑data aggregation and dashboards with Microsoft Power BI, driving faster operational insights and ongoing factory modernization.

Kennametal