AfriSam boosts performance, cuts costs and simplifies processes with SAP ERP on IBM System p

AfriSam is one of the leading suppliers of cement, aggregates and ready-mix concrete in Africa. The company has its headquarters in Roodeport, South Africa, and is committed to ensuring meaningful Black Economic Empowerment in the building materials industry. It operates from 74 sites across sub-Saharan Africa, and employs around 1,800 people.

Some years ago, the company decided to implement a centralized ERP solution to handle production and financial processes. After evaluating various different vendors, it chose SAP.

“SAP offered a real end-to-end solution and already had a large customer-base in the building materials industry,” explains Dev Govender, CIO of AfriSam. “Moreover, it was one of the only ERP providers that could provide a credible support structure for sub-Saharan Africa.”

AfriSam initially deployed its SAP applications on HP servers, but as the environment grew, the company started to experience performance and reliability issues. The IT department was beginning to find it difficult to meet its service level agreements, which specified a maximum average response time of 900ms and a minimum of 99 per cent availability.

“It was becoming increasingly clear that we needed to rethink the hardware infrastructure, especially since we also wanted to upgrade to a new version of SAP ERP. We wanted to be able to introduce self-service functionalities for our employees and managers, and the existing ERP applications did not support these features. IBM proposed migrating our SAP applications to the System p platform, which promised to deliver excellent performance and reliability.”

Choosing a hardware supplier

AfriSam looked at various hardware vendors, including the incumbent, HP. IBM and AfriSam’s in-house team worked together to implement SAP ERP 6.0 on the IBM System p platform. The environment now consists of an IBM System p 575, together with an older System p machine as a standby server.

Says Dev Govender, “We estimate that choosing IBM has saved us approximately 35 per cent in hardware, software and support costs, compared to offers we received from other vendors.”

Leveraging IBM System p technologies

The System p environment uses IBM Partition Load Manager to dynamically manage the processor and memory resources in each of the logical partitions (LPARs) that are used for the SAP application environment. Each LPAR can have maximum and minimum resource entitlements allocated to it, and the available resources are automatically and dynamically distributed between the LPARs in response to changing workloads in different parts of the SAP application landscape.

“With the virtualization capabilities of the new IBM System p server, we are able to make more efficient use of processor and memory resources, which means we can achieve much higher levels of performance without excessive investment in hardware,” says Dev Govender.

“The IBM POWER5+ processors give us average response times of 500 to 550ms in the SAP ERP environment, which is superb, especially as our SLA only requires 900ms! It is a performance improvement of around 37 per cent over the previous generation of IBM hardware, and more than 44 per cent compared to the HP servers – even though the new version of SAP ERP requires more powerful hardware to achieve the same level of performance.”

High performance storage and smart backups

AfriSam has also implemented a high-performance storage area network (SAN) for the SAP ERP environment, based around an IBM System Storage DS4800. The system’s high-speed disks and 4Gbps Fiber Channel connection provide excellent I/O performance, enabling the System p server to make maximal use of its processing power.

The ability to reliably back up business-critical SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence data from the DS4800 to an IBM TS3310 Tape Library is vital for the resilience of AfriSam’s business. However, as a 24x7 enterprise, there is little time available for scheduled maintenance – so backup windows need to be kept extremely narrow.

To deliver rapid and reliable backups, AfriSam deployed IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), which accelerates the process using a technique known as incremental backup. Instead of copying the entire data warehouse to tape every night, TSM logs the changes that have been made during the day and only transfers these to the tape – significantly reducing the backup data volume.

“The combination of Tivoli Storage Manager, the DS4800 and the TS3310 give us an extremely resilient infrastructure,” says Dev Govender. “Not only do the backups complete within the allotted maintenance window, but we have thoroughly tested the restore capability, and it works very well. Overall, the reliability of the entire infrastructure – servers and storage combined – has enabled us to exceed our SLA of 99 per cent availability.”

Simplifying processes with self service

With the new SAP applications in place, AfriSam is on schedule to roll out SAP Employee Self Service (ESS) and Manager Self Service (MSS) to all 1,800 employees later this year.

“We are already using the time/attendance functions to facilitate a seamless payroll process,” explains Dev Govender. “It is a huge improvement over our previous paper-based process, which took a long time and often resulted in errors when forms were lost or errors were introduced into our HR systems. The new process has helped us eliminate three days from the payroll cycle.

“The next step is to enable online pay slips and allow employees to update their personal details themselves – which will further reduce paperwork and administrative workload for our HR staff. We also want to introduce other workflows by integrating SAP ERP with our IBM Lotus Notes environment – so we are very excited by the Atlantic project.”

Atlantic is the code name of the first software product to be developed in a joint initiative by IBM and SAP. Atlantic will support SAP application workflows, reporting and analytics from within the Lotus Notes client.

“When IBM and SAP collaborate, exciting technologies are the result,” says Dev Govender. “A great example is the work they have done to optimize and integrate DB2 with SAP applications – which has been so successful that it has persuaded us to migrate from Oracle to DB2. If the Atlantic project can create similar synergies between SAP ERP and Lotus technologies, it will deliver major benefits for our business.

“With the new IBM hardware platform, SAP ERP 6.0 and Atlantic, we believe that the stage is set for us to go to the next level of business efficiency and agility.”