Alok India weaves new levels of integration into its business with IBM and SAP

Alok offers world-class integrated and state-of-the-art production facilities for home textiles, woven and knitted apparel fabrics, garments and polyester yarns. Founded as a family firm in 1984, Alok listed on the Indian stock market in 1993, reaching a sales turnover of more than INR18 billion ($450 million). Alok is among the fastest growing vertically integrated textile companies in India.

As the company grew, IT teams at each of the company’s locations had gradually modified the company’s business management software to suit its particular needs. To meet the need for better management control in the IT landscape, Alok chose to replace these existing Windows-based business systems, and became one of the first companies in its industry to implement a centralized solution based on the SAP ERP 5.0 application, running on the IBM System p5 platform. The solution delivers fast, accurate, group-wide business information and enables Alok to take better advantage of enormous growth opportunities in the Indian economy.

Selecting SAP software for flexibility

Alok worked with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an IBM Premier Business Partner, to review both textiles-specific and general ERP software as possible solutions. The company had already fully integrated its financial and manufacturing processes – from raw materials through to finished garments – and many of the textiles-only solutions did not include the complete range of management functionality, such as human capital management or business information. Alok identified a comprehensive ERP solution that could both meet its needs as a textile manufacturer and offer the greatest extensibility and flexibility.

“SAP offered a better track record in delivering both manufacturing and general management solutions than many competing ERP solutions, and the software could be easily adapted to the specific needs of an integrated textile business,” says Shaji Varghese, Head of IT at Alok.

Alok replaced multiple Windows-based systems with SAP software on IBM System p5 servers, running the IBM AIX operating system. The company implemented financials, controlling, materials management, plant maintenance, production planning, sales and distribution, and quality management applications, and plans to introduce human capital management, business intelligence and supply chain management software.

“The greatest advantage is that with SAP software, Alok has standardized applications and shared data between all the production plants, eliminating manual intervention and delivering accurate business data across the entire group. The solution from SAP and IBM eliminates human error, speeds information flow and enables management to make better-informed business decisions – and should significantly reduce our operational costs,” comments Shaji Varghese.

Scaling up with IBM System p

Changing from the legacy systems to both new software and a new server platform depended on building a strong business case for both the immediate value and long-term strategy for the company.

“The decision for IBM technology was based on a combination of value, return on investment and total costs of operation,” reports Shaji Varghese. “The IBM System p5 servers enabled Alok to implement a highly robust solution with the ability to grow rapidly at attractive price points. The service and support from IBM has been superb, fully justifying our decision to partner with them. The Alok board is very supportive of the use of IT to help drive business efficiency, and the partnership with both SAP and IBM is an essential part of the company’s success.”

Alok has implemented SAP software on an IBM System p5 550 as the principal production server, with a second p5-550 for the supporting database. Three p5-520s handle development and test, business intelligence and other applications. IBM worked with Alok to size the new server landscape; the dual-processor p5-550 production servers can be scaled up to four processors and 64GB memory if required.

A total of 400 people access the SAP applications, and around 600GB of production data is stored on a storage area network (SAN) that is based around IBM System Storage DS4700 and DS4300 hardware. The SAN uses fiber-channel connections to offer superb performance, and two eight-port switches have been installed to enable failover, support high availability and improve scalability.

The environment is backed up using an IBM System Storage TS3100 Tape Library Express, an ideal solution for mid-sized SAP software landscapes. The TS3100 supports IBM LTO Ultrium 4 Tape Drives, which offer native data-transfer rates of up to 120 MBps, helping to complete the backup process very rapidly. A Web interface provides simple, flexible remote management to help administrators keep tight control of the tape storage environment.

Insurance against business risk

Moving to just five centralized IBM System p5 servers has eliminated Windows servers at various locations and removed a layer of complexity from Alok’s IT operations, removing the need for site visits, local software updates and database synchronization.

Alok has also implemented IBM HACMP (High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing). Should a malfunction or outage strike one or more of the production systems, the application workload and users will be moved automatically to the remaining servers in the cluster, so that work can continue.

In addition, the company now uses mirroring to ensure data redundancy in its storage environment, and to protect against disaster, as Shaji Varghese explains:

“Following the introduction of the DS4700 to our storage area network, we can now mirror all data to our existing DS4300 as backup. In the past, if a production site lost its data, there was no simple way to recover it; but with the IBM solution we are able to provide a high-performance, robust disaster recovery solution for the entire group.”

He adds: “The IBM DS4000s are highly reliable, scalable storage systems that offer superb performance for our SAP software environment. The combination of this IBM storage hardware with HACMP clustering on the servers provides us with the resilience we need to keep our systems online at all times.”

Taking advantage of opportunities

Migrating to SAP applications on the IBM System p platform has helped to transform Alok’s business processes by resolving issues about standardized data. With a single software environment used across the whole operation, the company has been able to gain faster access to more accurate business data, while reducing the amount of manual processing required to collect, process and present group-wide information.

“Alok is growing very fast, and the SAP and IBM solution has helped us manage this rapid expansion by eliminating master data management issues,” says Shaji Varghese. “It has also eradicated manual workarounds and reconciliations, and released staff from both the financial and IT departments for more productive tasks.”

In addition to the reduction in operational costs, the solution provides a resilient infrastructure for both applications and data in a manner that would simply not have been possible with the former distributed systems – making a valuable contribution to the reduction of business risk.

The next steps include deployment of the SAP ERP Human Capital Management application and the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component. By using logical partitions (LPARs) on the IBM System p5 servers, Alok will be able to introduce the new services on the current physical servers, increasing the processing capacity precisely as needed.

“The excellent capacity and scalability of the IBM System p technology has reduced the requirement for new hardware investment and cut administration and maintenance costs,” says Shaji Varghese. “The integrated SAP software accurately reflects the vertically integrated nature of the Alok textile business. We are now preparing to introduce the SAP NetWeaver BI component, which will allow us more easily to analyze and act on business information.

“With group-wide information on sales, production and materials, Alok can squeeze inventory levels, improve production efficiency and, ultimately, deliver a better service to customers. The SAP software on IBM System p5 helps deliver business success and position the company to take advantage of significant new opportunities,” concludes Shaji Varghese.