Wolverine Worldwide enhances business performance and employee experience using RISE with SAP on Azure

Driving a digital shift

To support each brand and its rapid growth, Wolverine Worldwide has been an early adopter of innovative technology for more than two decades and deployed SAP Fashion Management, an apparel and footwear brand–oriented solution, to drive additional business impacts. The company wants to understand which technology each of its brands needs to run efficiently and be resilient, and then work together to implement that technology and make sure it’s not just turned on but truly adopted.

Recently, Wolverine Worldwide explored modernizing its technology infrastructure by migrating to the cloud. The company prioritized security, speed, agility, and maximum efficiency and found a solution that checked every one of those boxes. Ready to realize its ambitions, Wolverine Worldwide is migrating its datacenters’ applications and data to Microsoft Azure and upgrading to RISE with SAP on Azure. “We spent a lot of time researching how to make our existing landscapes work for the needs of today, and in a lot of cases, it just wasn’t very feasible,” says Shane Newmyer, Vice President of Enterprise Applications at Wolverine Worldwide. “RISE with SAP on Azure really expands our capabilities to grow internally and to meet the needs of our brands, and therefore, the needs of their consumers.”

The company is now making a full digital shift, becoming more data-driven than ever and creating a cloud foundation it will quickly build on. Wolverine Worldwide chose Azure to help spur individual brand growth and agility while also removing friction from both the employee and consumer experience and navigating global supply chain challenges. “We’re achieving our goals quite effectively with support from Microsoft and driving our business performance with data, making sure it’s visible, reliable, and, most importantly, actionable,” says Dee Slater, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Shared Services at Wolverine Worldwide.

Using RISE with SAP on Azure to propel into the cloud

RISE with SAP gives companies access to an array of SAP cloud-based services, solutions, and tools through a single license. Running this cutting-edge solution on Azure not only accelerates cloud journeys but also helps companies move and earn faster, combining advanced technology, hardware, software, and databases to better prepare businesses for success. Wolverine Worldwide is among the first footwear and apparel customers who’ve chosen to run on RISE, and involvement from Microsoft has helped ensure that employees could continue to share files, communicate, and collaborate in the cloud, especially while working remotely. “Using RISE with SAP on Azure helps us de-risk the program and focus on what’s important to Wolverine—growing and building these rapid and agile processes for our brands and testing new technology—as opposed to worrying about things like disk space or other resource constraints,” says Slater.

Migrating its SAP landscape to RISE with SAP on Azure over the next 18 months is one of the last steps in Wolverine Worldwide’s transition from an on-premises to a full cloud infrastructure. “When our team started on the cloud journey shortly before the pandemic, we laid out a plan to be out of the datacenter in three years,” recalls Slater. “We talk about it with our teams as moving out of the datacenter and into data science, and by moving to Azure, we can now scale up and scale down as needed.”

Wolverine Worldwide considers its migration to Azure “the cost of entry” to creating the modern workplace—something Wolverine Worldwide is particularly excited to deliver to its employees, complemented by Microsoft cloud services like Microsoft Power Platform to drive new efficiencies. “When we talk about an amazing workplace—whether it’s having single sign-on, being able to plug in quickly to new technology, or simplifying and increasing automation of routine tasks—speed and ever-evolving capabilities are what employees expect today,” says Slater. “We are confident this new SAP platform on Azure will help us sustain a modern workplace at Wolverine Worldwide, and we can use Power Platform and other Microsoft services to eliminate routine tasks going forward.”

Bringing together data and the best of SAP and Microsoft for improved security, agility

Moving to the cloud is a multiyear journey, but the trusted collaboration Wolverine Worldwide found with SAP and Microsoft made it significantly easier. “Bringing SAP and Microsoft together as we do this cloud journey and future upgrades creates what I would call a unified platform of best-in-class partners, whether it’s SAP on the software, technology, and business practice or Microsoft with the Azure cloud platform and resources,” says Slater. “The SAP and Microsoft teams understand our business and marketplace and articulated things that we didn’t even know we needed and that provided the ultimate solution for Wolverine Worldwide.”

A key motivator for Wolverine Worldwide’s move to the cloud was expanding its security posture with a range of Microsoft solutions including Azure ExpressRoute, all aligned with best practices on business processes. With its data now in Azure, Wolverine Worldwide is pursuing new opportunities to use Microsoft products and services, including Microsoft Power BI, to help secure and make the most of that data and increase agility in response to pressing business challenges. 

“In response to current supply chain challenges, we wanted to model things quickly with a digital twin of our supply chain,” explains Slater. “We partnered with an external group and built a tool set on Power BI that helped us make the best choices, whether we had to prioritize which shoes to make as our source countries opened up, figure out if it made sense to use air freight for shoes given the high costs, or understand how to best allocate scarce resources. That was a great taste of the power of data in making rapid decisions and putting analytics around that supply chain data.” 

Wolverine Worldwide is looking ahead with renewed optimism seeing the power of what’s possible thanks to the cloud. “Now that we’re moving to RISE with SAP on Azure, we bring in external data to drive more predictive analytics to help our teams spend more time making decisions instead of pulling data together,” says Slater.

On the brand side, Wolverine Worldwide brands like Merrell no longer have to deal with legacy infrastructure limiting the way they work because their own data, including critical operational data collected in SAP, is now moving to Azure. “We live in a world where you have to make quick decisions when you’re 63 percent sure of what the outcome is and then iterate moving forward,” says Chris Hufnagel, Global Brand President of Merrell. “For us, it’s now about having speed, agility, and flexibility. I’m spending less time worrying about the machine that I’m working with and more time actually interacting with the data.”

Unlocking a full range of cloud benefits

Running its SAP environment on Azure, Wolverine Worldwide enjoys a slew of on-the-ground benefits, including keeping up with the pace of change in the industry and empowering employees to make the best use of their time on the job. “We’re in the SAP stack and relying more on SAP to handle all things SAP, including patching, which frees our team to deploy new technology,” says Slater. “For example, because we’re getting out of the datacenter business, we’ll no longer have to allocate resources to datacenter refreshes anymore, and automating tasks will increase the speed at which data will be available at our users’ fingertips.”

The benefits cascade down to Wolverine Worldwide’s customers because the company can now provide better and faster service. “Whether it’s a consumer buying a pair of shoes or one of our great retail partners around the world reaching out to us, getting to answers is faster,” says Slater. “Because RISE with SAP on Azure is part of our overall data strategy, we’ll anticipate risks and issues much faster, allowing us to reduce issues and improve the entire customer experience.”

Given the massive performance improvements the company has seen in a short period of time, Wolverine Worldwide employees are already craving what’s next. “We have employees around the world who see how much faster the experience of running SAP on Azure is compared to our on-premises experience,” says Slater. “We’ve given our employees a taste of what the move to the Azure cloud platform is like and they’re hungry for more. We’re excited to bring it to them.” 

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