Published on 31-May-2008
Customer:
Toshiba TEC Europe
Industry:
Electronics
Deployment country:
France
Solution:
Business Resiliency, Integrated Data Management, Managing Business Infrastructure, Leveraging Information
IBM Business Partner:
Oracle
Overview
Toshiba TEC Europe is a leading subsidiary of the Toshiba Group. Toshiba Group, a world technology leader, manufactures a wide range of electronic and high-technology products for personal and institutional use. Toshiba also produces computing systems, industrial equipment and machinery, as well as other consumer electronics and appliances.
Business need:
Proactively manage application data growth to support business expansion and deployment of Oracle® E-Business Suite across business units. Increase application availability by reducing the time to complete 19,000 daily batch processing jobs exceeding 250 hours. Integrate and consolidate data and processes with the other Toshiba European entities to improve service levels and operational efficiencies.
Solution:
IBM® Optim™ Data Growth Solution for Oracle® E-Business Suite
Benefits:
Managed continued data growth and deployed Oracle E-Business Suite across business units by archiving to reduce database size by 30 percent. Increased application availability by archiving historical transactions to shorten time to complete 19,000 daily batch processes by 75 percent. Improved service levels and operations by implementing Optim to provide access to current and historical transactions.
Case Study
Challenges
Proactively manage application data growth to support business expansion and deployment of Oracle® E-Business Suite across business units. Increase application availability by reducing the time to complete 19,000 daily batch processing jobs exceeding 250 hours. Integrate and consolidate data and processes with the other Toshiba European entities to improve service levels and operational efficiencies.
Why IBM?
IBM Optim provides comprehensive database archiving capabilities to address data growth issues and integrates with Oracle E-Business Suite to improve overall business processes.
Solution
- IBM® Optim™ Data Growth Solution for Oracle® E-Business Suite
Benefits
- Managed continued data growth and deployed Oracle E-Business Suite across business units by archiving to reduce database size by 30 percent.
- Increased application availability by archiving historical transactions to shorten time to complete 19,000 daily batch processes by 75 percent.
- Improved service levels and operations by implementing Optim to provide access to current and historical transactions.
Oracle E-Business Suite supports Toshiba operations
Toshiba TEC Europe is a leading subsidiary of the Toshiba Group. Toshiba Group, a world technology leader, manufactures a wide range of electronic and high-technology products for personal and institutional use. Toshiba also produces computing systems, industrial equipment and machinery, as well as other consumer electronics and appliances.
With one of two photocopier manufacturing sites located in France, Toshiba TEC Europe conducts its marketing, sales and distribution activities across Europe. The company relies on Oracle® E-Business Suite to manage critical business information that supports financial and manufacturing, as well as supply chain and commercial business operations.
Managing data growth becomes an issue
Toshiba TEC Europe implemented Oracle E-Business Suite for its French business units in 1998. Since 2003, Toshiba has deployed these Oracle applications in four other European countries, and the size of the production database has increased to well over 510 gigabytes (GB). Over time, business users started noticing that online application response time was taking longer. In addition, the time required to complete 19,000 daily batch processing jobs was taking more than 250 hours. Degraded application performance and availability were having a negative impact on critical production, logistics and sales activities.
In considering a solution to address these service level and availability issues, Michel Poupon, the Oracle E-Business Suite Application Manager at Toshiba TEC Europe, was convinced that the best approach was to segregate and remove the rarely accessed historical transactions from the production environment. However, Toshiba had no plans to launch an internal project to develop such a solution.
Poupon and his team considered the complexity and the high risks of the data management problem to be solved, and they anticipated that starting an internal development project would be extremely expensive. At the same time, Toshiba’s Data Processing Department was already mobilized on other critical European projects, and was pressured to meet absolute deadlines for completing these projects to support revenue-generating business initiatives.
Expansion and upgrade plans justify finding a solution
As application data growth continued, the need to improve data management and service levels for Oracle E-Business Suite was critical to support the company’s future business expansion. The need to manage data growth was driven by both business requirements and also by the fact that Toshiba TEC Europe would have to integrate and consolidate data and processes with the other European entities. In addition, in the beginning of 2005, the IT Department made the decision to move from Oracle database version 8i to Oracle 9i, and planned to complete this project by the end of that year. These factors provided the motivation and justification needed to move forward in finding a solution.
In May of 2005, Poupon attended an enterprise data management presentation hosted by the IBM® Optim™ team at the AUFO (Association des Utillisateurs Français d’Oracle) user group meeting. Poupon quickly recognized that the IBM Optim Data Growth Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite offered the capabilities needed to respond to the data growth issues. Optim also provided a proven solution for his project to archive and remove inactive Oracle E-Business Suite transactions.
The process of evaluating Optim began in September. The Optim team worked with the IT Department and Michel Poupon at Toshiba TEC Europe to verify Optim’s capabilities for archiving transactions from one of the Oracle E-Business Suite modules. Inactive transactions were archived successfully and saved to an archive database. Because Optim integrates with Oracle E-Business Suite, placing archived transactions in a separate database allowed authorized users to have easy access to both current and historical transactions, which provided a definite advantage.
Implementing archiving – a phased approach
The IT Department decided to implement Optim using a phased approach, with the first phase starting in October 2005. The goal of the first phase was to define the business policies and rules for archiving Oracle E-Business Suite historical transactions and data from 1998 to 2002. The first phase would focus on the Inventory (INV), Bill of Materials (BOM) and Global Accounting (AX) modules, which included financial entries posted in French Francs and Euros.
At the same time, the Euro’s conversion project initiated the move from Oracle database version 9i to Oracle 10g, which was scheduled to be completed by April 2006. Phase I of the Optim implementation was also planned to be completed in 2006, with the implementation of archiving capabilities for the General Ledger
(GL), Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), Order Management (ONT), Purchasing (PO), Work in Process (WIP) and Shipping (WSH) modules.
The second phase of the Optim implementation, scheduled to begin in 2007, will focus on archive processing for additional European sites. The IT Department at Toshiba TEC Europe will work with the application managers and business units to define the requirements, policies and criteria for archiving Oracle E-Business Suite transactions in each country (Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark). This joint effort will ensure compliance with the local business regulations and the enterprise data management needs specific to each entity.
Optim delivers substantial benefits
As a result of the decision to implement Optim, combined with the move to Oracle 10g, Toshiba TEC Europe achieved significant benefits on an enterprise scale. For example, initial archive processing reduced the size of the Oracle E-Business Suite database by 30 percent, from 510 to 360 GB. Ongoing archiving and managing historical transactions in an archive database provides business units with improved service levels and direct access to historical information.
Similarly, the time to complete the 19,000 daily batch processes was reduced by about 75 percent, from 250 hours to only 65 hours. This dramatic change increased the availability of Oracle E-Business Suite applications and improved service levels to satisfy business unit requirements and support continued business growth.
In addition, after implementing Oracle 10g, the production databases were reorganized to further improve service levels. This effort made it possible to recover and reuse database capacity and ensure optimal service levels to support later implementations of Oracle E-Business Suite for other Toshiba European entities.
Thanks to Optim’s database archiving capabilities, Toshiba TEC Europe is now able to take a proactive approach for managing data growth in the Oracle E-Business Suite production environment and across its enterprise.
About IBM Optim
IBM® Optim™ enterprise data management solutions focus on critical business issues, such as data growth management, data privacy compliance, test data management, e-discovery, application upgrades, migrations and retirements. Optim aligns application data management with business objectives to help optimize performance, mitigate risk and control costs, while delivering capabilities that scale across enterprise applications, databases and platforms. Today, Optim helps companies across industries worldwide capitalize on the business value of their enterprise applications and databases, with the power to manage enterprise application data through every stage of its lifecycle.
For more information
To learn more about IBM Optim enterprise data management solutions, contact your IBM sales representative or visit: www.optimsolution.com.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
IBM Optim Data Growth Solution for Oracle E-Business Suite
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2008 IBM Software Group 111 Campus Drive Princeton, NJ 08540-6400 U.S.A. www.optimsolution.com Produced in the United States of America 05-08 All Rights Reserved DB2, IBM, the IBM logo, Optim, OS/390, Relationship Engine and z/OS are trademarks or registered trademarks of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. All other company or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. This case study is an example of how customers use IBM products. There is no guarantee of comparable results. References in this publication to IBM products, programs or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates or does business. IMC14039-FREN-00
