Customer story
Observability in Action: Scotts Miracle-Gro’s Journey to 90% SAP Efficiency Gains
From Reactive to Strategic SAP Operations with Avantra Automation
We needed better access to data about critical operations… our engineers were so busy reacting to day-to-day urgency, we had to outsource more strategic activities.
Manikantan Velayudhan Pillai, Head of Scotts SAP Basis team
As the global leader in branded lawn and garden products, Scotts Miracle-Gro operates at massive scale, processing over 3 billion data rows per week. With a lean IT team and mission-critical SAP workloads running on AWS, the company needed real-time insight, faster system refresh, and fewer manual touchpoints.
They turned to Avantra, the intelligent observability and automation platform purpose-built for SAP landscapes.
The Challenge: Operational Bottlenecks Slowing Digital Transformation
Scotts’ SAP Basis team was contending with several pain points:
- Manual, error-prone workflows consuming expert timemulti-cloud and regional data centers
- Lack of integration between SAP system health and ServiceNowmillion per hour
- Overwhelmed with more than 500 support tickets monthly
- Prolonged system refreshes taking 4 days and 5 staff
- QA test environment refreshes taking 3 days with frequent outages
- Downtime incidents detected late, risking service continuity
An unexpected outage—discovered hours after it began—catalyzed the search for a digital operations platform. Avantra quickly emerged as the ideal AIOps partner.
The Solution: End-to-End SAP Automation with Real-Time Visibility
With Avantra, Scotts gained a full-stack, AI-powered AIOps solution tailored to SAP environments.
Key capabilities included:
- 24/7 SAP landscape monitoring via real-time observability dashboards
- Automated anomaly detection with integration to ServiceNow ticketing
- Built-in automation workbooks for complex workflows like system refresh
- Predictive analytics using AI/ML to surface performance risks and trends
- Personalized dashboards for root cause visibility and fast troubleshooting
Avantra eliminated the need for manual spreadsheet-based tracking and gave Scotts IT the tools to work smarter—not harder.contracts.
Engineers love it… we don’t want to spend time maintaining and patching. That’s why we use Avantra to do all the monitoring for us.
Emily Wall, VP, Infrastructure Operations and Services
The Impact: Fewer Tickets, Faster QA, and a 95% Drop in System Refresh Time
Avantra helped Scotts Miracle-Gro shift from reactive maintenance to strategic enablement:
- Support tickets dropped from 500+ to <50/month — a 90% reduction
- System refresh now takes 4 hours, down from 4 days — 95% faster
- QA testing refresh cut from 3 days to 4 hours — with real-time insight
- Simultaneous refresh of up to five SAP systems, managed by a single engineer
- Implementation time for observability and ServiceNow ticketing: just weeks
The Takeaway: Empowering IT to Focus on What Matters
With Avantra’s intelligent automation, Scotts no longer sacrifices innovation for stability. SAP Basis engineers now focus on high-value projects—from cloud migrations to advanced analytics—while Avantra ensures round-the clock visibility, system health, and faster issue resolution.
Deployment was swift: observability features were live in weeks, and automation templates enabled fast rollout across systems. ServiceNow integration took just one day, enabling auto-ticket generation for anomalies with built-in remediation guidance.
Automation in system monitoring drives better system health, better end user experience, and frees up time for innovation.
Manikantan Velayudhan Pillai