Procter & Gamble modernizes SAP on Azure with 40% average performance gains

Before most people have finished their morning routines, Procter & Gamble has already touched their day. From the detergent in the laundry room to the toothbrush at the sink, P&G’s brands operate at a scale measured in billions of daily interactions. Enabling that reach requires more than manufacturing. It demands a tightly integrated global system of data, logistics, and decision-making. At the center of that system is SAP, powering the core processes behind manufacturing, supply chain, and financial operations that keep P&G’s global business moving.

At P&G’s scale, even minor disruptions can have global implications. The company’s move to the cloud was not about modernization for its own sake. It was about safeguarding the continuity of operations that billions of consumers depend on. Security, resilience, and agility were not nice-to-haves. They were non-negotiable requirements for systems that simply cannot fail.

“We wanted to strengthen our cyber and operational resiliency. We wanted to improve disaster recoverability. And we wanted to move beyond managed hosting models, which were limiting our agility,” says Paola Lucetti, Senior Vice President and Global Chief Technology Officer at Procter & Gamble.

For a company defined by operational discipline and risk awareness, this was not just a technology migration. It became a multi-year transformation program designed to modernize architecture and resiliency at scale, improve performance, and strengthen the foundation for some of the company’s most critical systems.

Building the case for a new SAP foundation

Before moving to Microsoft Azure, much of P&G’s SAP landscape was hosted in a third-party managed environment. That landscape included a mix of Unicode and non-Unicode ECC systems supporting mission-critical business processes across the company. The environment worked, but it imposed constraints on flexibility and made it harder for P&G to pursue the levels of resilience, recoverability, and operational responsiveness it wanted going forward.

Those pressures became more urgent as the company looked to modernize core systems while preserving stability for the business. For P&G, that meant treating cloud transformation as both a technology initiative and an operational risk-management exercise.

“We followed a very rigorous decision process,” Lucetti explains. “Our goal was to keep the business experience stable while making significant improvements. Confidence came from preparation and proof, not just intent.”

P&G evaluated Azure cloud carefully over several years. For its largest SAP workloads, Azure ultimately met the company’s requirements for scale, security, and reliability. Just as important, Microsoft partnered closely with P&G through planning, engineering, testing, and execution.

That partnership mattered as P&G needed a cloud platform that could support very large SAP workloads, standardization across business regions, high-availability architecture, and future transformation to SAP S/4HANA, all without disturbing core business operations.

Separating risk while moving at scale

The migration program, known internally as “Phoenix,” began migrations in April 2023. P&G structured the effort in multiple waves across more than 60 SAP production systems supporting different business regions, typically moving less critical systems first and then applying those lessons to more critical workloads.

The company also took a deliberately phased approach to SAP transformation. In some cases, systems already in progress toward SAP S/4HANA were allowed to complete that transformation before moving to Azure. In other cases, P&G migrated systems to Azure first to establish a stronger infrastructure base before undertaking application modernization. The key principle was to separate major changes wherever possible to reduce complexity and lower business risk.

“The phased approach really let us address the highest priority first while keeping the business stable,” says Lei Zhu, Vice President of SAP at Procter & Gamble. “We first built a secure and resilient foundation on Azure and reduced the immediate infrastructure risk without changing the user experience. That created a stronger platform for longer-term SAP modernization and future innovation.”

Each migration wave was built around business continuity. P&G conducted detailed planning, platform testing, performance validation, and dress rehearsals before cutover. That rigor was essential because even a well-executed move would fail if it introduced instability into the company’s make, pack, and ship business-critical functions.

Using Azure to support the largest SAP workloads

One of the most distinctive elements of the project was P&G’s use of very high-memory Azure virtual machines for its largest SAP workloads. Those capabilities were especially important for central finance and other memory-intensive applications that demand scale, throughput, and stability under heavy transaction volumes.

P&G became the first customer to collaborate with Microsoft at the engineering stage for these systems and today runs its central finance environment at 32 terabytes, the largest SAP SKU currently available on Azure. The company also uses Azure Virtual Machines in the Mv2 and Mv3 families to support large-memory workloads and SAP S/4HANA transformation efforts.

“Those very high-memory Azure virtual machines were essential for our largest and more demanding SAP workloads,” Zhu says. “Their high-memory capacity, strong I/O performance, and newer processor technologies helped improve performance significantly for our business applications.”

P&G says it has seen about a 40% average performance improvement in business processes running on those machines. That includes faster financial close cycles, accelerated backend jobs, and stronger support for high-volume workloads requiring near real-time processing. At P&G’s scale, those gains translate into faster processing across business functions and improved responsiveness for systems that support global operations. The company also used Premium SSD and Azure NetApp Files to deliver the low latency, high throughput, and strong data protection its SAP environment requires.

Designing for resilience across regions

For P&G, cloud migration was as much about recoverability as performance. The company designed its SAP environment on Azure with both high availability and disaster recovery in mind, using multi-availability-zone architecture within a region and cross-region disaster recovery for added protection.

That approach was intended to reduce downtime risk and support continuity for global operations. Among other solutions, Azure Site Recovery became an integral part of that strategy, supporting replication and recovery across primary and secondary regions for many SAP workloads.

The partnership with Microsoft also helped shape the platform. During the project, P&G requested improvements to recovery capabilities, including a tighter recovery time objective that Microsoft ultimately cut from two hours to one hour for P&G’s (and now all Azure customers’) most critical workloads. That pressure reflected the reality of P&G’s operational environment, where even short disruptions can affect manufacturing, supply chain, and finance at a global scale.

Moving to Azure also gave P&G a more standardized global platform for SAP infrastructure. With common patterns across North America, Europe, and Asia, the company could apply more consistent security standards, operational practices, and monitoring across regions while creating a stronger base for further automation.

A partnership built around engineering and execution

The scale of the migration required close coordination across internal teams and strategic partners, especially Microsoft and SAP. P&G set up program governance, clear ownership, and regular review forums at both working and leadership levels. Each organization played a distinct role. SAP maintained the core business platform, while Microsoft provided the Azure foundation. Both partners offered support across planning, engineering, testing, and execution.

That structure helped P&G manage risk, resolve issues quickly, and keep the overall program moving. It also gave the company a way to combine its own operational discipline with external engineering support during a major transformation.

“Programs of this size and scale can only succeed when there is strong alignment and strong partnership,” Lucetti says. “This has been a very complex project for us and a major overhaul. It required a lot of discipline, a lot of meticulous preparation, and outstanding partnership.”

That partnership extended beyond immediate migration needs. P&G described the work as a joint effort in which Microsoft continued improving Azure capabilities to meet the company’s scale and operational requirements, while P&G brought demanding real-world workloads, testing, and feedback to the table.

One specific outcome was on-demand capacity reservation. P&G influenced Microsoft to deliver guaranteed capacity for its most critical workloads.

Creating a platform for modernization and AI

With much of its SAP foundation now running on Azure, P&G is turning its attention to the next phase: modernization. That includes continuing SAP transformation work, increasing automation, and using AI more broadly to improve operations and simplify support for both users and internal teams.

“Now that we have a strong SAP foundation on Azure, we can focus on the next steps,” Lucetti says. “That includes using AI more effectively and widely to improve operations, increase automation, and simplify support for our teams and users.”

For P&G, the move to Azure was never just about infrastructure relocation. It was about building a more secure, resilient, and scalable operating foundation for some of the company’s most critical systems at global scale.

In that sense, the Azure migration is not the end of the story. It is the platform from which P&G can continue to operate its most critical systems with greater speed, resilience, and consistency at global scale, while laying the groundwork for ongoing modernization and innovation.

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