SAP on Google Cloud for Manufacturing Improves Innovation and Performance

“We’re already seeing a lot of future enhancements that can be made to our internal systems and ways of doing business. With Google Cloud, SAP, and Managecore – a Protera company, we’re confident that we can take advantage of those opportunities with greater speed moving forward.” 

— Michael Puleo, Global Director, IT, BK Medical

Challenge

Manufacturing and distributing medical devices globally comes with a host of challenges. In any industry, dealing with compliance, data, and process management challenges, as well as distribution, resource planning, and customer experience complexities, can drive up costs at even the most well-run companies.  

For manufacturers of complex medical devices, the challenges are magnified due to varying compliance requirements, distributed supply chains, and more. To adapt, more manufacturers are moving into the cloud. BK Medical, an ultrasound device manufacturer with operations in Denmark and the U.S. decided to make the change to cloud-based IT following its divestiture from a parent company. The three current divisions - one in Denmark and two in the United States - create the various components of the machines and once combined, they are sent directly to surgeons and doctors to be used during procedures.  

“Our tools allow surgeons and doctors to perform ultrasounds on patients in real-time, expediting the process,” says Michael Puleo, Global Director of IT at BK Medical. “We rely on SAP for our enterprise resource planning (ERP), HR, and other core processes to build the best possible ultrasound machines for medical professionals who need them.”  

BK Medical and its parent company had been running SAP applications in-house with on-prem servers. When the split occurred, it needed to separate its data and systems, which proved to be the perfect opportunity to get into the cloud. BK Medical ultimately chose to work with Google Cloud and partner Managecore – a Protera company to begin running its SAP on Google Cloud. 

Modernizing SAP Application Management 

“In some ways, we are a 40-year-old startup,” says Michael. “We’ve been in operation since 1993, but now we are trying to stand up all our applications. Since we have a lean team, we needed a partner like Managecore – a Protera company to accomplish our SAP goals.”  

Just ahead of the split, BK Medical worked to create a different company code in the same SAP system as its parent company. It then needed to establish how it could split the applications and run its own system autonomously.  

BK Medical also knew it would need to maintain its own datacenter but wanted to limit CapEx spending and minimize its on-prem footprint. “Our mandate was really to work with all of our vendors to complete this project as quickly as possible with no disruption,” says Michael. “Managecore – a Protera company crafted a great plan. I was able to act as an internal project manager while they took care of all the technical components.” 

With the right team in place, BK Medical quickly stand up all its own SAP systems, and lift-and-shift its data into Google Cloud over one weekend. BK Medical, Managecore – a Protera company, and Google Cloud worked together to handle the data migration, including validation processes, and the longest part of the go-live ended up being the process of copying its old database from an on-prem data center to Google Cloud. Even this took less than a day to complete. The 600 GBs were migrated over starting after business hours on a Friday.  

The remaining conversion components were finished with systems up and running by Sunday evening. On Monday morning, everything was running with no disruption to operations. “Managecore – a Protera company provided the expert guidance we needed to successfully and confidently migrate our SAP systems and database to Google Cloud,” says Michael. “We were impressed at just how well they understood our systems and what we needed to do to make this project seamless for our end-users every step of the way. They made us feel comfortable and always acted in our best interests.” 

The Early Rewards of Cloud 

With its SAP ECC, ERP, data warehouses, and other applications running on Google Cloud along with its deployment of Vertex AI Platform, BK Medical has begun to hit its stride as a newly autonomous company.  

With a relatively small team, having its infrastructure managed externally allows the company to remain hyper-focused on its core mission of manufacturing and distributing the best ultrasound devices while providing medical professionals with exceptional customer experiences. Slight changes to user experiences have also been key in improving BK Medical’s core operations.  

For example, now that the company runs its SAP applications on Google Cloud, logging into the system is completed through single sign-on (SSO ). Users have been impressed with the ease of getting into the systems they need to complete tasks compared to the more arduous process prior to migration. Choosing to run its SAP applications on Google Cloud was also advantageous from an uptime perspective. When evaluating other cloud vendors, the company had worried about outages, as well as where its ERP and other data would reside. 

“Since the changeover to Google Cloud, we have had 100 percent uptime of our SAP systems,” says Michael. “We’re already seeing a lot of future enhancements that can be made to our internal systems and ways of doing business. With Google Cloud, SAP, and Managecore – a Protera company, we’re confident that we can take advantage of those opportunities with greater speed moving forward.”  

BK Medical also chose to use Google Cloud because of its specializations in enterprise-wide system management. In addition to financial savings, BK Medical saw this migration as an opportunity to potentially begin utilizing other Google Cloud database and analytics tools. The company also capitalizes on a reduced need for inhouse resources devoted to infrastructure management thanks to the new Software-as-a-Service model it has established.  

Now, BK Medical is considering an upgrade to S/4HANA on Google Cloud, the incorporation of new cloud native reporting tools to streamline its data management practices and shifting data warehouses into BigQuery. The company is working to get its data and business analysts more accustomed to the new SAP environments to better analyze performance, opportunities, and more. 

“We know we’re barely touching what SAP can do for a manufacturing business,” says Michael. “The integrations SAP provides are second-to none, no one has come up with a better solution in 40 years.