Brakes India centralizes SAP software environment with IBM

Brakes India manufactures braking systems and ferrous castings for customers in the automotive industry and other sectors. The company employs around 3,500 people at six major manufacturing sites, three smaller centers that deal with just-in-time assembly, and four warehouses. The company generated turnover of around Rs. 11 billion (US$220 million) in 2006.

For many years, the company relied on a legacy ERP solution based around the Ingres database platform. Data centers at each of the six main manufacturing sites ran separate instances of the solution, customized to meet local needs.

With this decentralized infrastructure, it was difficult for Brakes India to get an enterprise-wide view of operations. Accounting procedures involved manual collation of data from the different business units, which was complicated and time-consuming. Without the ability to maintain an accurate record of warehouse inventory levels, overstocking was common.

Maintaining separate IT teams for each of the sites was expensive, and finding staff who had the required skill levels in the existing Ingres database platform was becoming difficult. Brakes India is expanding rapidly, and the ability to start up and absorb new business units quickly is essential to success. The lack of a modern, standardized ERP system with support for industry best practices was beginning to impede the company’s ability to grow in a cost-effective manner.

“We knew it was time to update our infrastructure – and we wanted to move to a central, standardized platform that would stand us in good stead for the future,” says T N Rangarajan, Vice-President of IT at Brakes India.

Making the right choice

Brakes India consulted reports from industry analysts such as Gartner to create a shortlist of appropriate ERP solutions.

“SAP was the frontrunner from the beginning,” says R Madhusudhan, Vice-President (IT Projects). “And when we considered that many of our customers, suppliers and other component manufacturers were already using SAP software, the business case became even more compelling. We could see that their SAP ERP implementations offered a rich array of features, and realized that moving to the same platform would potentially make it easier for us to interface with these companies in the future.”

The company worked with SAP to design an environment based around SAP ERP 5.0 with applications that would handle financial accounting, cost controlling, sales and distribution, materials management, plant maintenance, and quality management for a total of 300 concurrent users.

To make the most of this new platform, Brakes India decided to rethink its hardware environment, and centralize systems to a single data center based at company headquarters in Chennai.

“We considered all the large hardware vendors, and evaluated them on a number of factors,” says T N Rangarajan. “We are a fast-growth company, so we needed the systems to be highly scalable, and we also have a large number of power users, so performance was important. Equally, high availability is crucial, so we wanted a fully redundant solution with clustered servers. According to these criteria, IBM was by far the best supplier for our needs.”

Moving to a centralized infrastructure

Brakes India deployed two IBM System p5 570 servers at its Chennai data center, each of which contains eight active POWER5+ processors. The processing resources are divided into a number of partitions, running the central SAP software instance, the Oracle database, and a number of application, quality, development and backup servers. The SAP application servers and database servers are clustered, so that if one server fails, Brakes India will not suffer downtime.

“Leading-edge features such as Advanced POWER Virtualization and On-Off Capacity on Demand make the p5-570 an ideal platform for our SAP software environment,” says T N Rangarajan. “For example, if any of our systems develop faults, Capacity on Demand will allow us to activate spare processors within one or both of the p5-570s temporarily – handling the workload until the problem can be resolved.”

The System p Advanced POWER Virtualization (APV) Suite enables dynamic logical partitions (LPARs) to make use of spare processing capacity as and when required, and return it to the free pool when it is no longer needed. The POWER Hypervisor monitors and allocates these resources according to customer-defined LPAR sizing parameters and priorities.

“We can allocate more resources to our test and development environment when demand increases, and quickly return it to production systems afterwards,” explains T N Rangarajan. “Advanced POWER Virtualization ensures that we are making the best possible use of hardware resources across our entire environment.”

Fast SAP software backups

Brakes India has also implemented a storage area network (SAN) based on an IBM System Storage DS6800 storage system and an IBM 3583 Tape Library. The environment is managed by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Advanced Copy Services, which enables Brakes India to use the DS6800’s FlashCopy functionality to back up the SAP software environment without taking the databases offline.

“Tivoli Storage Manager for Advanced Copy Services delivers real benefits to our business by substantially reducing our required backup window and minimizing the need for planned downtime – keeping our SAP environment available for users 24x7,” comments R Madhusudhan.

“The scalability of the DS6800 architecture is a major positive for us, as our storage needs are growing rapidly,” adds T N Rangarajan. “We have 750GB allocated to our production partition, and we have already used a large percentage of it. By the end of the year, we will probably need to expand the SAN, but it isn’t a problem – we can simply add more disks to the DS6800.”

Integrated communications

Brakes India uses IBM Lotus Domino as its email and collaboration platform, and has integrated it with the SAP software environment to help information flow and improve monitoring.

“When the SAP software detects that it is running out of memory or CPU resources, it automatically sends an email to the relevant administrator,” explains R Madhusudhan. “Also, the sales and distribution application from SAP can send advance shipment notices to interested parties when an order is dispatched. We are also looking at routing inventory reports through Lotus Notes as well. The Lotus integration is a great way to keep everyone informed – even users who don’t have direct access to our SAP software.”

Benefits of centralization

The new solution has integrated all of Brakes India’s information systems and data, providing a single point of control. Accounting, sales and supply chain management processes have been standardized across the whole organization, making it easier for the company to set up new business units quickly, and eliminating the need to collate information manually.

“With a single repository for master data, there’s no confusion and no duplication of effort,” says T N Rangarajan. “And centralization also brings benefits in terms of system maintenance and upgrading: we only need a skeleton IT staff at the local sites, and there are no more issues over which versions of software are installed on which machines.”

The solution has already delivered tangible benefits in a number of areas. For example, the increased visibility of group-wide inventory information has enabled the company to reduce overstocking at its four warehouses, saving storage costs and ensuring that the right parts of the business get the right materials at the right time.

“The real savings will come when we expand,” concludes T N Rangarajan. “Setting up manufacturing sites and expanding our business will be easier now that we have a standardized IT infrastructure. We will be able to get new business units up and running, profitably, much more quickly, which is a huge benefit.

“SAP and IBM have helped us transform our IT environment,” he concludes. “The combination of industry-leading ERP software and high-performance System p hardware is delivering major benefits already, and will be an excellent platform for future expansion.”