Sino United Publishing increases business agility with IBM and SAP

The Commercial Press (H.K.) Ltd. was established in 1914 in Hong Kong, initially acting as the retail branch for its Shanghai-based parent company.

In September 1988, the management office of Joint Publishing Limited, Chung Hwa Book Company (Hong Kong) Limited and The Commercial Press (Hong Kong) Limited formed Sino United Publishing (Holdings) Limited. At the time it was established, the company consisted of 15 publishers, and major business interests included publication, retail, printing and properties. Currently there are 29 publishers, with branch offices throughout China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, the USA and Canada.

Today, publishers under the Sino United Publishers brand specialise in the creation, distribution and retail of educational and cultural materials across a variety of media, including print, CD-ROM and the Internet.

One of these publishers - The Commercial Press - aimed to increase its speed of response to changing patterns of demand – and by so doing, enable tighter control over inventory.The Commercial Press implemented an ERP solution using SAP software in mid-2000. In 2004, it was decided not only looked to update this ERP solution but also to deploy the same solution for The Commercial Press's holding company – Sino United Publishing (Holdings) Ltd. (http://www.sup.com.hk) and the other companies in the group.

Patrick Lok, PMP, IT Manager of The Commercial Press and the project manager of the Sino United Publishing (SUP) ERP solution, comments: “In a competitive marketplace and with growing demand for Internet-based publishing, we needed to perform financial and marketing analysis more rapidly. We selected to implement the SAP Retail solution on new generation Intel processor-based servers on the IBM System x platform. We wanted to protect our existing investment in Microsoft SQL Server, which we now use as the database for SAP applications. IBM System x is a highly reliable Intel-based platform that supports the most advanced technologies, so we were sure it would be the right choice.”

“The SAP software was upgraded to the latest version, followed by the migration from our previous-generation storage solution. The migration was painless and rapid. The new SAP applications enable us to carry out near-instant analysis of sales data. With the IBM and SAP solution, we can now respond more rapidly to changing consumer tastes, and adapt our inventory accordingly.”


Understanding customer demand

The long production cycle involved in publishing – books must be commissioned, written, edited, proofed, typeset, printed, bound and distributed before they can be marketed and sold – makes effective inventory control an absolute necessity. Even where electronic publishing and online distribution are involved, lead times are long, and The Commercial Press must keep a close eye on production volumes to avoid having insufficient or excessive inventory, both of which eat into profit margins.

The success of The Commercial Press ERP programme encouraged group management to deploy the same solution for the whole company. Upon completion the deployment, management could monitor the group on sales, purchase, and inventory performance.

Patrick Lok, PMP explains the need for the new ERP solution: “The market in Hong Kong is extremely competitive, and it is critical to understand the evolution of consumer demand at the earliest opportunity. We simply could not get the financial and marketing reports quickly enough from the previous system, and the lack of integration simply meant deficiency in marketing analysis”

The ERP solution for SUP uses the SAP Retail solution portfolio running on two clustered IBM eServer xSeries 445 servers running Microsoft Server 2003 Enterprise, while the SAP applications run on three xSeries 365/366 servers. The x445 database servers have dual fibre-channel connections to an IBM System Storage DS4500 storage system and a TotalStorage 4560 Ultrium Scalable Tape Library, forming a totally-redundant, high-performance storage area network with no single point of failure.

The high-speed SAN backup network enables SUP to back up and restore business-critical data from the SAP production environment quickly and securely.

“We have 3.5TB of data in our SQL Server databases,” says Patrick Lok, PMP. “IBM has the latest and most stable technology on the Intel platform, and the IBM SAN solution ensures that our systems can provide 24/7 service without the risk of losing data.”

“With expert assistance from IBM Hong Kong, we achieved a smooth, safe and rapid hardware and database migration to the latest version of the SAP software, assured the successful implementation of SAP for Retail software,” he adds.


Automated management reporting

Because the solution no longer relies on manual data collation or data re-keying, and with tight integration between the different SAP applications, the company achieves rapid, automated and accurate management reports. In addition to providing up-to-the-minute sales analysis, the SAP application has significantly reduced the administrative workload for business analysts, enabling them to focus on interpretation rather than collation.

“The SAP for Retail solution portfolio covers all necessary functional areas, and enables us to take data straight from our point of sale systems into OLAP analysis,” says Patrick Lok, PMP. “This means we can carry out almost instant analysis of changing sales trends, with very little administrative overhead. And on the technology side, the IBM infrastructure offers excellent redundancy and high availability, and has thereby reduced the maintenance cost.”

With real-time sales reports delivered through the SAP for Retail solution, SUP's ERP solution can track the performance of sales promotions, identify changing market conditions and adjust its sales strategy appropriately. It can also use more accurate and timely sales information to improve its inventory control. “By seeing more quickly what we are selling, we can ensure that we have the optimum inventory level,” says Patrick Lok, PMP.


Phase One completed

The first phase of SUP's ERP project was completed in mid-2006 and the company is now installing SAP Solution Manager on an xSeries 305 server.

“SAP Solution Manager will give us better information about the SAP applications and components that we have in place and their configuration, and will allow us to monitor performance more easily,” says Patrick Lok, PMP. “We anticipate that this will improve availability, reduce response times, and cut administrative overheads.”

He concludes, “The combination of SAP software and IBM server and storage technology has produced an excellent solution for Sino United Publishing. The IBM System x servers are reliable, scalable and easy to manage, and there is a clear advantage in choosing IBM as the hardware solution provider.”