Blue Star Gains 2x Faster Reporting and Lowers IT Expenses by 15% with SAP on AWS

Headquartered in India, Blue Star manufactures heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and commercial refrigeration systems. The business has a global presence with subsidiaries and joint ventures in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, and it serves a variety of corporate, commercial, and process applications, including residential customers.

Blue Star's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, SAP S/4HANA, used to run on premises and supported key business functions including sales, manufacturing, and finance across its 50 locations. However, as server workloads increased, notably during critical periods like month-end close, the company encountered a decline in the performance of SAP S/4HANA. This required finance personnel to work through the night to generate reports, record transactions, and complete month-end reconciliations. Moreover, Blue Star's IT team faced challenges with its on-premises infrastructure. The system was not only time-consuming to update but also posed scalability issues with high initial capital costs, particularly during the company's expansion phase.

To alleviate IT workloads and enhance staff performance, Blue Star decided to migrate SAP S/4HANA to the cloud. This transition would simplify the scaling of compute power and storage, aligning with the growing needs of the organization and freeing up time for IT to focus on innovation. Gautam Anand, general manager of IT at Blue Star, explains, "We aimed to free up the IT team's time from administrative tasks, so that they could focus on delivering tangible business value.”

Blue Star conducted proofs of concept (POCs) using various cloud service providers but ultimately selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its critical operations. According to Anand, "We had confidence in AWS because it has a longer history of running SAP workloads on the cloud compared to other providers in India." Furthermore, the company had multiple workloads on AWS and anticipated the ability to seamlessly scale performance.

During the POC, Blue Star achieved 30–40 percent better performance with SAP S/4HANA on AWS compared to its legacy on-premises infrastructure. Anand says, "We found that no other cloud provider yielded the same results as AWS."

To optimize migration, Blue Star worked with AWS Partner Sapphire Infotech Ventures Pvt Ltd (Sapphire Infotech), which achieved AWS SAP Consulting Competency. Sapphire Infotech had prior experience with Blue Star's SAP environment, having assisted with its SAP S/4HANA upgrade in 2021. Over several months, Sapphire Infotech and Blue Star collaborated closely, focusing on detailed migration planning. Bhavesh Lakhani, founder & CEO at Sapphire Infotech, emphasizes, "It wasn't a simple lift-and-shift. We conducted a thorough analysis of the interfaces between SAP and other Blue Star systems."

After extensive planning, including connectivity testing and mock migrations, Blue Star and Sapphire Infotech successfully completed the SAP migration to AWS at all 50 Blue Star locations within a 2-day timeframe. Sapphire Infotech utilized native SAP tools such as SAP Standard Migration Tools—SWPM (Software Provisioning Manager) and AWS Launch Wizard—to migrate the SAP environment into multiple environments, including one dedicated to disaster recovery, spread across various AWS Availability Zones to enhance resiliency.

Each AWS environment adhered to an accredited SAP design, incorporating Amazon EC2 instances for secure and scalable compute capacity suitable for virtually any workload. Additionally, Amazon EBS provides a flexible, high-performance block storage service ideal for IOPS-intensive SAP workloads. Amazon EFS is used as a serverless, fully elastic file storage solution, and AWS Config plays a pivotal role in assessing, auditing, and evaluating resource configurations, supporting Blue Star's auditing and systems compliance requirements.

Following the migration's completion, Blue Star employees noticed an immediate improvement. Complex reports that used to take an hour to run now took 20–25 minutes, and basic reports that had taken minutes were now ready in seconds. The biggest impact was felt towards the end of the first month. “We saved an entire day completing month-end processes,” says Anand. “We didn’t have to work overnight and into the next day to get work completed.”