Stable, Resilient HA Environment Brings Peace of Mind to NEB  

“Managecore – a Protera company delivered high quality work, shared knowledge with our team, and truly listened to me as a client throughout our highly complex migration project to the Microsoft Azure."

— Christian Gaden, Project Manager at NEB

Challenge

Since implementing SAP in 2014 the enterprise application has served as the core system supporting manufacturing, quality, sales and distribution, materials management, and finance. NEB’s SAP S4/HANA instance is highly integrated with electronic order channels (i.e. web, EDI, procurement portals, and IoT freezers located at the customer sites). NEB also makes extensive use of Fiori. 

NEB has always relied on a 3rd-party for SAP Basis and infrastructure support but was dissatisfied with the quality of care they were receiving. Frequent outages, delayed projects, and unacceptable downtime metrics were the norm. With a multi-year global rollout of their SAP system on the roadmap, NEB needed to create a stable platform and find a more reliable SAP managed services partner ASAP. 

“SAP is a global platform that currently supports our US, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand operations,” said Lennox Brown, Manager of IT Business Applications at NEB. 

Experts in SAP and Public Cloud solutions, Managecore – a Protera company quickly ascended as NEB’s top choice, providing customer centric SAP Basis managed services, averting the typical help desk queue, and offering a powerful client portal via its Watchdog Platform to automate Basis and Cloud processes. 

Strategic Guidance for the Cloud Journey 

Managecore – a Protera company stepped into plan, administer, and oversee the company’s SAP to Azure Cloud migration, proactively offering strategic guidance throughout the project’s lifecycle. Each member of our migration team shared their knowledge and kept the NEB team well-informed. Transparency from the outset led to a highly successful Cloud migration. In addition to seamlessly managing all technical aspects during the migration project, the team architected and delivered a High-Availability (HA) infrastructure, complete a troublesome solution manager upgrade, and resolve a painful single sign-on issue. 

“Managecore – a Protera company delivered high quality work,  shared knowledge with our team, and truly listened to me as a client throughout our highly complex migration project to the Public Cloud (Azure),” noted Christian Gaden, Project Manager for NEB. 

Watchdog was installed as part of the migration project so NEB would have the ability to proactively monitor their SAP system. Watchdog is a powerful monitoring and automation platform that detects issues and produces reports that can be leveraged by both Managecore – a Protera company’s customer engineers and its clients. 

 This delivers real-time access throughout the migration and beyond to notably elevate transparency within the customer’s own SAP landscape. “Before Watchdog, we needed to log into our PI server for a snapshot of time and we only received a report once each week,” said Gaden. “Now we have a tool to display the real-time status continually throughout the day along with our full history of data.” 

Results

After the system went live, NEB continues to receive consistent, hands-on support from our customer-facing engineers that demonstrated they were more than technologists; they are also a tight-knit team that worked collaboratively to ensure NEB’s long-term success. 

“The quality of work Managecore – a Protera company provides is above and beyond. All levels of employees looked out for our best interest via open and direct lines of communication,” says Lennox Brown, Manager, IT Business Applications 

The fully managed Public Cloud (Azure) High Availability infrastructure has given NEB an enormous amount of peace-of mind and confidence to continue with their global rollout. All for less cost and a lot less effort. Having a stable and resilient HA environment has enabled them to virtually eliminate planned downtime, orchestrate mid-week patching, support their 24x7 global operations, and keep the business operating while NEB brings products to market in order to support the development of tools and vaccines for SARS-CoV-2.