Subros meets the challenges of business growth with IBM and SAP

Subros manufactures integrated air-conditioning (AC) systems for major automotive companies in India, including Maruti, Tata, Mahindra, General Motors, Nissan and VW. Founded in 1985 as a joint venture between the Suri Brothers, Denso Corporation, Japan and Suzuki Motor Corporation, Japan, Subros has grown rapidly, with three manufacturing plants, an R&D center and a tool room in Noida, and a further two plants in Manesar and Pune.

Subros manufactures integrated air-conditioning (AC) systems for major automotive companies in India, including Maruti, Tata, Mahindra, General Motors, Nissan and VW. Founded in 1985 as a joint venture between the Suri Brothers, Denso Corporation, Japan and Suzuki Motor Corporation, Japan, Subros has grown from a capacity of 15,000 units to 750,000 units, with plans to reach one million units per year in 2008. Subros has three manufacturing plants in Noida, plus an R&D center and a tool room, with a further two plants in Manesar and in Pune.

Already the largest company of its type in India, and the only integrated AC manufacturer in the country, Subros continues to grow rapidly, adding three new manufacturing sites in 2006 alone. As more automotive companies set up manufacturing facilities in India to take advantage of its low cost-base and the highly skilled local workforce, Subros is in a strong position to win significant new contracts and to expand its operations further.

To support its expansion and to ensure that it could continue to meet the demands of just-in-time manufacturing, Subros decided to upgrade its existing SAP ERP environment. The company also wanted to ensure currency for support purposes, and to enable the creation of a new strategic decision-support system for senior management.

R D Malav, General Manager IT Corporate at Subros, explains: “We wanted to upgrade our SAP software and refresh the hardware platform to make it more capable of supporting our expanded operations – and better able to grow to meet future requirements. We also wanted to deploy SAP NetWeaver Portal as the basis for delivering better business intelligence to our executives.”

Switching to System p

Subros invited Sun, its existing hardware vendor, and IBM to propose a new server and storage infrastructure, basing its decision on the technical quality of the proposal as well as on the projected total cost of ownership, scalability, and vendor’s technology roadmap.

“The IBM solution was the winner in every area,” says R D Malav. “The POWER architecture of the IBM System p5 platform offered excellent virtualization capabilities, and the roadmap over five to ten years was much clearer, giving us full confidence in our choice.”

Subros selected Siemens Information Systems Ltd. to perform the upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0 software, and chose IBM to implement the new server and storage landscape. Subros uses most of the standard SAP ERP functionality, including financial accounting, cost controlling, materials management, sales & distribution, human capital management, plant maintenance and quality management.

The production software runs on two IBM System p5 520 servers in an IBM High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP) environment mutually monitoring themselves by a heartbeat mechanism. Each has three logical partitions (LPARs), one for the central instance of the SAP software, one for the Oracle database, and one for the SAP application servers.

The two p5-520s are load-balanced, and share the workload generated by the 150 Subros users. In the unlikely event of a failure of essential components in one server, the HACMP technology would automatically switch critical production workload to the remaining server in the cluster, with a negligible impact on applications.


R D Malav comments, “The IBM System p5 platform offers superb scalability, with the high availability we need to support our just-in-time operations. The virtualization capabilities were a key selling point for the System p5 solution, giving us greater flexibility and reducing the total cost of ownership by around 60 per cent.”

A p5-510 is used for testing and quality assurance, while a third IBM System p5 520 at a second site offers a development environment and is also used for disaster recovery purposes. “The p5-520 is virtualized, and we allocate minimal resources to the DR partition in normal operation,” says R D Malav. “If we ever needed to switch production over to the second site, we could simply dynamically resize the DR partition, reallocating the resources otherwise used for development.”

An IBM System Storage DS4700 with fiber-channel disks provides high-performance storage for the SAP environment, and two IBM System x3550 servers complete the solution, running SAP Solution Manager and delivering the Internet Demonstration and Evaluation System (IDES) for SAP ERP via a thin-client architecture.

“The System x servers are an ideal platform for IDES, helping our users learn about the different capabilities of SAP ERP via a simple Web browser,” says R D Malav. “The x3550s provide excellent performance and are highly cost-effective, helping us keep our System p environment free for production workload.”

Moving up a gear

The switch to SAP ERP 6.0 on the IBM System p5 platform delivered an immediate and significant boost in performance, cutting average response times for the SAP applications from 2,500 ms to 1,000 ms, improving the speed and efficiency of internal processes and eliminating user frustration.

“Beyond the tremendous performance improvement, the System p5 servers offer extremely high availability for our SAP applications,” says R D Malav. “It’s good to know that the HACMP clustering is there as a safety net – but the servers themselves are so reliable that we have never actually needed to fail over.”

The introduction of server virtualization has eliminated multiple redundancies from the Subros infrastructure. The production environment, which would otherwise require six separate servers – each with its own uninterruptible power supply, cooling and floor space requirements, networking – is handled by just two IBM System p5 520s.

“Virtualization on the System p5 platform is a great advantage in terms of cost-effectiveness,” says R D Malav. “Not only do we avoid the purchase and maintenance costs of additional physical servers, but also we eliminate all of the associated costs for software licensing, administration, power, floorspace and cabling. The use of Virtual I/O also means that we require fewer switches and cables, reducing the complexity in the data centre.”

Absolute reliability

As a just-in-time manufacturer, Subros makes hourly deliveries straight onto its customers’ production lines. Any failure to deliver the right components in the right quantities at the right time could have a catastrophic impact, bringing the production line to a complete standstill.

Says R D Malav, “Just-in-time means that we need to be very close to our customers, and extremely responsive to their changing requirements – high availability and absolute on-time delivery are business-critical. The IBM hardware gives us full peace of mind – we have not had a single second of downtime since implementing the System p5 servers.”

He adds, “The support from IBM is also excellent, with instant access to the very deep pool of IBM knowledge, and clear escalation paths to ensure that any issues are ironed out as quickly as possible.”

Leaner, more agile enterprise

With the new SAP environment in place, Subros is now working on its plans to re-engineer business reporting processes by introducing a new executive decision-support system based on SAP technologies, capitalizing on the excellent performance offered by the new System p platform.

“We are aiming to take live operational data and use it to drive better strategic decision-making,” says R D Malav. “Rather than being dependent on manual reporting, filtered through a layer of middle management, we want our executives to have fast, accurate reports and KPIs at their fingertips, and to be able to view a balanced scorecard on their desktops.”

R D Malav concludes: “By transforming our reporting processes and using SAP technologies to eliminate the delays and inaccuracies introduced by manual processing of business information, Subros will reap the benefits. By bringing the top level of management much closer to the basic operations, we expect to reduce delays, boost productivity, and create a leaner, more agile enterprise. The powerful IBM System p platform will enable us to provide this information in real-time, and will thus play a significant part in the future of our SAP ERP strategy.”