Strategy and Solutions
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Our client is a multi-continent manufacturing company whose ERP drives supply planning, MRP runs, procurement, plant scheduling, inventory, order management, and financial close. The on-prem ERP stack had accreted customizations over two decades—bespoke reports, third-party plug-ins, tightly coupled batch jobs—while the infrastructure underneath aged into high cost and inconsistent performance. Remote plants complained of slow queries; maintenance windows grew longer; and the IT budget skewed toward sustaining hardware instead of funding new capabilities.
Leadership set three goals: (1) lower infrastructure and support costs without compromising control, (2) improve global accessibility and performance for round-the-clock operations, and (3) adopt a release and testing model that reduces risk and downtime. They engaged Zymr to plan and execute a phased cloud migration and to leave behind a CI/CD-enabled, testable ERP footprint.
In essence, the business needed a safer, faster ERP that could scale globally, cost less to run, and evolve continuously—without a big-bang cutover that threatened production.
Success in migration depended on sequencing and safety: move the right pieces first, prove data and behavior match, then advance—while protecting uptime and auditability.
Highly interdependent modules (SCM, Finance, Manufacturing, Quality) exchanged data through custom tables and nightly ETL. A lift-and-shift would reproduce brittleness; a rewrite would miss timelines.
Users in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas accessed ERP across all hours. A long outage would ripple into missed shipments, idle lines, and delayed invoicing.
The ERP dataset—work orders, BOMs, supplier T&Cs, GL entries—had to migrate with perfect fidelity and traceability. Financial audit trails could not be compromised.
Power users had tuned local workflows to compensate for system quirks. A migration that ignored these realities risked adoption friction and shadow workarounds.
The issue wasn’t just “moving servers”; it was untangling a living system. We needed a migration plan that respected dependencies, a validation regime that proved sameness, and a change program that helped people succeed on day one.
Zymr converted a costly, fragile ERP into a reliable global platform. The company spends less to run more, serves users faster, and executes changes with confidence—turning back-office modernization into a frontline advantage.
Modernization paid twice: once in opex, and again in agility. The ERP now supports growth instead of limiting it.
The ERP now behaves like a service, not a monolith: changes are tested, deployments are routine, and capacity flexes with the calendar. Plants report fewer “wait screens,” finance closes on schedule, and IT budgets fund enhancements instead of hardware.
Savings were tangible, but the bigger win was control: the business can ship, plan, and close with confidence because the platform is stable and evolvable.
These second-order effects reduce daily friction and accelerate future work—new modules, new plants, and new partners can be onboarded without re-architecting.
The cloud ERP has become a backbone for improvement: fewer bottlenecks, clearer ownership, and faster paths from request to result.
Zymr started with analytics, reporting, and self-service inquiry modules to validate network paths, identity, and data replication. We then advanced to procurement and inventory before tackling finance and production planning. Each phase included sandbox, staging, and production rehearsals.
Change-data-capture pipelines streamed DB updates to the cloud during dress rehearsals. For cutover, we ran a short freeze, executed final delta loads, and verified row counts, checksums, and business invariants (e.g., open POs = open receipts + open invoices). Automated reconciliation compared cloud vs. on-prem results down to line-item and currency rounding rules.
We containerized integration jobs, introduced managed databases with read replicas per region, and fronted the ERP web tier with an anycast CDN for static assets. APM traced slow queries; indexes and connection pools were tuned by region/time-of-day. Autoscaling policies matched batch windows and close cycles.
SSO via the corporate IdP enforced MFA and conditional access; role-based access was rationalized and re-certified post-cutover. At rest and in transit encryption was enforced globally. Access and change events flowed into a tamper-evident log for audit.
We built pipelines for configuration transport, extension deployments, and report changes. Regression suites replayed critical transactions (create PO → receipt → invoice match, MRP run, GL posting) after every change. Canary releases allowed module-by-module promotion with instant rollback.
A blue/green pattern kept the old environment warm during the first weeks. Runbooks covered DNS flips, queue drains, and cache warm-ups; backout criteria were time-boxed and objective (latency/error thresholds, reconciliation pass/fail).
We trained super-users, built task-based guides (“Year-End Close on Cloud”), and staffed a hypercare desk with functional + technical leads to resolve issues within hours, not cycles.
Collectively, the approach de-risked migration with evidence at every step: data equivalence proved integrity, controlled cutovers preserved uptime, and CI/CD made future changes safer and faster.
We didn’t just move the ERP; we made it observable, testable, and releasable. Safety came from phasing and proof; performance came from right-sizing; sustainability came from pipelines and governance.
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