Technology upgrades can be disruptive — but they often pave the way for stronger, more scalable operations and set organizations on a path toward better business outcomes.
At global medical device company Align Technology, rapid business growth underscored how critical the right infrastructure foundation is for resilience. As volumes increased, the company needed to ensure its operations were “always on,” explained Mary Kumar, SVP, Enterprise IT Engineering.
Kumar recently sat down with ASUG to discuss Align’s decision to adopt RISE with SAP and the business drivers behind the move, which included the need for a stable, always-on platform and the need to free up internal resources to focus on SAP S/4HANA migration.
Headquartered in San Jose, Align manufactures Invisalign, a leading brand of clear aligners used to straighten crooked or crowded teeth as an alternative to traditional braces. With some one million aligner parts produced daily, Align operates the largest 3D printing operations in dentistry; the company serves doctors in over 120 markets worldwide.
To support this scale, Align redesigned its architecture to include autoscaling capabilities. But the very mechanism intended to handle spikes in demand created new challenges. “Out of the blue, because of the volume peak, it would autoscale, and we’d get an outage for two seconds,” said Kumar, noting the instability introduced by the design.
Those few seconds were costly. A two-second outage could cause a backlog of over 8,000 transactions, with Align’s operations taking as many as five hours to recover. This issue required 30 people to resolve and caused major impacts to the company’s round-the-clock production schedule, becoming a key impetus for RISE. “Business driver number one,” said Kumar, “was looking at: how do you get to the stability of that environment?”
“I had heard about RISE, and I said, explain this to me: I need an always-on environment, and I need a single person and function accountable to manage the environment,” said Kumar.
According to Kumar, the decision to adopt RISE with SAP was driven not only by the need for a stable, always-on platform but also by the need to free up internal resources to focus on SAP S/4HANA migration. Additionally, Align needed to reassess its security and patching protocols; in the SAP ECC environment, Kumar and her team were still manually managing, patching, and updating systems — a time-consuming process that diverted attention from other business needs.
Though Align had committed to SAP S/4HANA, leaders struggled to focus on its design and architecture, given the attention that ECC required. Handing platform management responsibilities over to RISE with SAP ensured that all patches and updates were implemented and freed up the team to concentrate on S/4HANA and support Align’s high-volume, mission-critical operations.
Achieving better business outcomes
Align’s RISE implementation process involved partnership with Google Cloud and engagement from TCS, which helped address coordination challenges and ensure a smooth transition.
In addition to stability, resource optimization, and better security and maintenance, Align also saw significant performance improvements and reduced total cost of SAP ownership relating to platform, licenses, and personnel.
“The benefit of moving to RISE is that it is stable,” Kumar said. “It is auto-scales without disrupting operations. We did architecture design with Google to make sure of that. Performance-wise, when we went live, we were 40% faster.” Kumar credits this efficiency gain to architecture design, given that Align didn’t enlarge the system, instead focusing on optimization. Today, that high performance helps Align contend with accelerating volume growth.
Providing Align with an efficient way to move from ECC to S/4HANA, RISE has also enabled business transformation initiatives, supported by the implementation of SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (BRIM) for subscription revenue and Joule, SAP’s generative AI assistant. These initiatives set Align up to better navigate emerging business trends, such as the growing importance of compliance and regulatory reporting and the shift from buying treatments to buying outcomes.
According to Kumar, the shift towards subscription-based and outcome-based business models in the dental industry requires Align to adapt its systems and processes accordingly.
“I’m opening up the ability to sell outcomes with BRIM to the doctors and subscriptions,” said Kumar. “That is super-critical. We are implementing a new pricing engine to give pricing transparency to the doctor: ‘You’re buying this, you’re getting this discount, and here is how it flows.’”
Tips for a seamless SAP implementation
Kumar shared several valuable insights from Align’s experience implementing Rise with SAP.
Align’s implementation strategy involved migrating non-production environments first to prove out configurations, following a methodical approach from staging to development, pre-production, and finally production.
Align kept one environment on the ECC system as a backup during the transition and maintained contracts with previous providers as a contingency.
Kumar emphasized the importance of having a leader who is knowledgeable in SAP infrastructure, rather than SAP applications, and recommended building a team of 4-5 infrastructure-savvy individuals within the organization to work on the project.
Managing internal team dynamics was another key point. Kumar advised setting clear expectations for the team to focus on facts, not opinions, and establishing trust by making it clear that the decision to move forward with RISE was final. Kumar also highlighted the importance of helping team members understand that their roles would evolve, not disappear.
Partner management is crucial for success. Kumar stressed the need for executive-level understanding of a project’s importance, emphasizing critical deadlines and business impacts, such as the inability to close books.
Regular meetings with all stakeholders were essential, as was building a clear view of SAP’s team structure. Kumar explained that SAP operates with three distinct groups—the project team, the RISE team, and the platform management team. Because these teams did not always communicate effectively, Align frequently had to bridge the gaps itself. Adding to the challenge, SAP’s default approach was to communicate primarily through the system integrator, which risked leaving the customer out of critical conversations. To keep priorities aligned and issues resolved, Align had to invest extra effort in asserting its position directly with SAP across all three groups.
Finally, faster SAP performance impacts connected systems. When the SAP system operates faster, downstream systems need to be prepared for the increased volume. An implementation approach that is methodical and focused on risk mitigation ensures business continuity throughout the transition.
The migration to RISE with SAP was transformative for Align and continues to support the company’s broader digital transformation initiative, allowing business leaders to modernize their technology landscape while maintaining the stability essential for their manufacturing and order processing operations.
The migration is now delivering measurable improvements through stability, performance, and cost savings. By eliminating the critical autoscaling “blip” that once caused transaction backlogs, the company achieved smoother operations and 40% faster performance without requiring system upgrades.
Cost savings followed through reduced ownership expenses, streamlined platform management, and strategic contract negotiations. Beyond efficiency, the move unlocked strategic advantages, from enabling subscription-based revenue models to scaling seamlessly to handle high-volume production. Align is producing one million aligners a day, with touchless processing from the doctor’s scan to production and shipping.