Case Study: Reaping the Benefits of Microsoft Azure
The Digital Transformation of Jiffy Growing Solutions
See how WatServ helped Jiffy Growing Solutions migrate from its aging ERP system to the cloud, improving efficiency, optimizing data, and saving costs.
Jiffy Growing Solutions was founded in the 1950s with a vision to make a positive environmental impact and overcome sustainability challenges. Headquartered in Zwijndrecht, Netherlands, it has production locations across the U.S., Canada, Sri Lanka, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Spain, and Estonia, employing more than 1,000 people worldwide.
Jiffy helps customers feed and beautify the world using sustainable plant growing solutions. It offers a wide variety of tailor-made products for growers worldwide and works closely with product manufacturers, suppliers, and stakeholders to improve sustainability, efficiency, and product quality, maximizing the positive impacts of its products and materials developed for the circular economy.
Planting the seeds of a strong partnership
An infrastructure and managed services client for the past 13 years, Jiffy always looks to WatServ for reliable services and expert support. Recently, WatServ helped Jiffy move its infrastructure to the cloud for cost optimization and to enable increased focus on data intelligence. By migrating its legacy data infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, Jiffy was able to consolidate its data footprint while using business insights provided by Power BI and Dynamics to improve its products and services.
As the company grew, Jiffy’s network became more complex to manage because of varying business systems and an expanding product portfolio. Jiffy and its partners relied on Excel spreadsheets and Dynamics AX environments to keep account of all their product lines and supplies. Each global location had its own processes, which resulted in siloed data that caused inconsistencies and slowed processes, hampering business decisions. Synchronizing all of the data took a long time and put strain on resources that could better serve the company in other ways.
Knowing there was a better way, Wesley Lacroix, a business IT and ERP Consultant, was engaged by Jiffy to help migrate its current AX 4.0 environment to Microsoft Dynamics 365.
WatServ has been a trusted technology partner for many years, working with Jiffy to host and manage its workloads in a private cloud data centre, ensuring a securely managed and optimized environment. With WatServ’s advisory support, knowledge of Jiffy’s existing environment and expertise in public cloud, WatServ was the best partner, and the one and only choice, to take them to Azure.
The agriculture analytics market is expected to reach $2.27 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 17.5% during the forecast period of 2020 to 2027. The growth of this market is mainly attributed to the rising adoption of advanced analytics, data-driven decision-making techniques, and growing digitalization in the agriculture industry. 1
A team approach helps Jiffy blossom into a data-driven company
“A WatServ-led migration always starts by asking a lot of questions to validate and confirm, listening to our clients’ desired experiences and goals, and then aligning the technology that will best serve those needs,” says Joshua Satheiswaran, Director of Client Success at WatServ. “That’s our culture at WatServ. We build strong relationships with our clients. We don’t want to be merely an IT supplier; we aim to be a trusted partner that tailors our services to your exact needs.”
WatServ, along with the Microsoft Assessment Desk, utilized Microsoft’s Block 64 methodology for the initial assessment to determine the best way to securely migrate its on-premises servers to the cloud. A clear roadmap was drawn up, including customizations, applications, and the necessary security features.
Data gaps and the numerous workflow customizations that needed to be put in place presented a challenge. So, the migration process began with testing activities conducted during weekends to avoid any downtime. The team worked on all the customizations first, before enhancing performance.
“WatServ’s team of experts worked around the clock, providing critical support for us during the transition, which included moving our data into Microsoft 365. Their support provided greater security for our data, and they ensured we had the right tools in place to manage the migration efficiently,” shares Lacroix.
Once in the cloud, Jiffy began using Power BI to simplify and analyze the large quantities of data it regularly sifted through. Without siloes in the way and with access to a broader set of data services, Jiffy now benefits from complete end-to-end architecture on a single platform, turning unrelated data sources into valuable business insights and adapting faster to changes in market conditions. The company is also able to scale, easily, when the need arises.
WatServ freed Jiffy from spending time on data management and storage to focus more on data analytics and business intelligence. “We’re experiencing numerous benefits in the Azure platform, such as quicker response times between companies around the world,” says Lacroix. “With Power BI, our company is more robust because we can access more data from various sources with real-time updates to provide a more accurate analytical profile.”
“Cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics AX allows you to see all the moving parts of your business more efficiently, improving productivity and profitability. A stronger ERP solution is not only exceptional for gaining valuable business insights; it’s usually less costly,” says Satheiswaran.
A bright and exciting future primed for growth
Jiffy leaned on the strength of its relationship with WatServ to revolutionize its business. WatServ has proven itself a reliable partner throughout the cloud migration journey, helping to improve efficiency, avoid outages, and enhance security.
“WatServ is proud to support a company that is committed to sustainability,” says Satheiswaran. “It feels good knowing that we are enabling Jiffy to continue helping to feed and beautify the world and grow its business.”
Lacroix notes that WatServ was the ideal partner to help plan and develop Jiffy’s cloud strategy because of its expertise with Dynamics, Microsoft 365, and Azure. WatServ helped Jiffy integrate all its data into a single environment and become a truly data-driven organization.
“Throughout the planning and the migration, WatServ was really good in supporting and communicating with us, and that communication and care continues still,” says Lacroix.
Following the migration project, WatServ completed an Azure Optimization initiative, which analyzes the resources utilized, builds data models and predicts the best fit size for the workloads. As a next step, WatServ will be acting on the recommendation to right size and apply reserved instances to its workloads, ensuring efficiency and cost optimization.
WatServ’s expertise in designing and optimizing cloud solutions, coupled with its premium 24x7x365 support, enabled Jiffy to smoothly migrate its business operations to the cloud. WatServ might be your company’s perfect partner as well. Learn more about WatServ’s cloud migration services.
References
[1] ResearchAndMarkets.com, “Agriculture Analytics Market by Component, Application, Deployment, Farm Size, and Region – Forecast to 2027”
Select Business Outcomes
Integration of multiple business solutions enabled Champion to improve financial planning, gain better visibility, consolidate reporting, improve customer relationship management and more.
WatServ hosted regular status calls with Champion and their VAR partner to ensure transparent communications with all parties. These calls ensured both a proactive and reactive focus on performance, technical tuning and application optimizations. Over the years of working together, this amounted to more than 225 status calls.