Case Study: Coats achieves real-time global manufacturing insights with Microsoft Power BI

Thread manufacturer spins its future in the cloud

Coats, the world’s leading industrial thread manufacturer, needed to modernize fragmented IT across some 60 factories and 7,000 wired employees—facing slow SAP reporting (up to 48 hours), inflexible datacenter provisioning, and uneven global e-commerce performance. To solve this, Coats partnered with Microsoft Power BI and the broader Microsoft cloud stack (Azure, Office 365 and SAP HANA on Azure) to gain scalable infrastructure, unified identity and real-time analytics.

By moving nearly its entire datacenter into Azure, migrating Office 365 for 7,000 users, consolidating SAP on HANA in Azure, and deploying Microsoft Power BI dashboards, Coats achieved dramatic results: report times dropped from six hours to six minutes, production planning moved from overnight to same-day, provisioning shifted from weeks to hours, and e-commerce performance improved in key markets. Microsoft Power BI enabled real-time, multi-source visibility that accelerated decision-making, cut costs, and improved customer service.

Coats

Harold Groothedde

Technology Solutions Director