Bergendahls tackles rapid growth with SAP Retail software and IBM

BergendahlsGruppen AB is a family-owned retail and wholesale company based in southern Sweden. Mikael Bergendahl founded the company in 1922, and third and fourth generations continue to run the business today. The company operates and supplies supermarkets and department stores, and has some 2,000 employees.

Innovation is important for Bergendahls, which strives to exceed customer expectations by offering a very wide range of product lines (called ‘assortment’ in the retail trade) and providing excellent service to large and small customers alike. Bergendahls had chosen IBM in partnership with SAP for its retail operations and distribution infrastructure, running SAP Retail software on the IBM System p platform. When Vivo, a very large Nordic retailer, placed its distribution contract with Bergendahls, the company faced a near-doubling of workload, practically overnight.

Jens Gleisner, Head of IT, explains: “Turnover increased from SEK 7 billion (€728 million) a year to more than SEK 13 billion (€13 million). Business increased dramatically which we had to manage without our regular customers feeling any negative effects.”


United for growth
To cope with the rocketing workload, Bergendahls needed to upgrade the hardware platform for its SAP Retail software, while continuing to support other in-house systems cost-effectively. The company had a large install-base of IBM System i solutions, running applications under OS/400, and also a number of Intel-based servers running Microsoft SQL Server databases.

By selecting a new IBM System i5 solution capable of running not only i5/OS (the successor to OS/400) and AIX natively, but also Microsoft Windows (through an Integrated xSeries Adapter), Bergendahls was able to bring together all of its diverse platforms in a single physical system. Per-Ola Hassel, IT Manager, chose to implement an IBM System i5 570 solution with five POWER5 processors, running both i5/OS Version 5 Release 3 and AIX 5L 5.3 operating systems. The i5 includes an IBM Integrated xSeries Adapter, connecting it to five IBM System x 365 servers, allowing Windows applications to be managed from the same single point of control.

“If we hadn’t selected the System i5 solution, we would have had to buy a number of other servers, which would have cost us a lot more,” says Hassel.

“The i570 is very easy to manage – it practically runs itself, so staff are able to spend more time working on business applications instead,” adds Hassel. “The ability to run i5/OS and AIX side-by-side on the same physical system, sharing processor resources, is phenomenal. And the ability to bring Windows into the same high-availability environment is a big advantage.”

Flexible and responsive
The SAP for Retail software environment at Bergendahls includes finance/controlling, warehouse management, materials management, and sales and distribution modules. The SAP for Retail software is linked to an Oracle database, and both run in an AIX partition with dedicated disk and LAN on the i570. A second AIX partition, used for SAP for Retail test and development, has virtual disk and LAN resources. The Oracle database, which is managed by SAP Content Server, is growing by 620MB a day, recording more than 300,000 invoices daily.

“Dealing with perishable goods is different from selling TVs or clothing. Some of our goods have a shelf life of three days and we need a system and consultants who understand what that implies,” says Jens Gleisner.

“Working with IBM Global Business Services, we used SAP for Retail software to create precisely the right platform for our growing business. The SAP solution is flexible and highly responsive, so it can continue to help us through our expansion phase.”

The ability to work with Scandinavian-speaking consultants who had retail systems experience with similar companies was an important factor. IBM Global Business Services had recently completed a large project with a supermarket chain in Norway and understood the challenges Bergendahls faced in its operations.

Running alongside SAP for Retail on the i570 are several other business systems, which run under the i5/OS operating system using the integrated IBM DB2 Universal Database (UDB).

These systems share the processing and disk resources seamlessly with the AIX partitions, and are managed using the same tools. The attached System x servers also use the IBM System i5 disk and network resources, bringing Windows-based systems into the same high-availability environment. Bergendahls recently implemented SAP NetWeaver platform with Microsoft SQL Server database under Windows Server 2003 on one of the IBM System x machines.

“By consolidating to the i570, we will achieve dramatic reductions in the long-term total cost of ownership for our SAP software and other business systems,” says Gleisner. “Effectively, we now have a single physical system to run everything, so there is only one machine to maintain and upgrade.”