Epson America enhances global performance with SAP and IBM

Epson America, Inc. is the US affiliate of the Japanese Seiko Epson Corporation, and offers a wide range of image capture and image output products for consumers and businesses. Headquartered in Long Beach, California, the company has sales offices throughout the US and subsidiaries in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Venezuela.

Seeking to increase efficiencies and reduce operational costs, the company embarked on a major strategic project to replace all its major business systems with a single integrated solution that would be capable of consolidating and standardizing operations for all its subsidiaries in the Americas.

Russell Link, Manager of Technical Services at Epson America, says, “If we could set up a solution that would combine data from our multiple subsidiaries in a single central database instance, we would be able to improve the quality and availability of information across the enterprise, while reducing manual data entry and duplicate work. We would also be able to introduce workflows to streamline approval processes, improve the speed of financial closes, and increase our reporting capabilities to help executive managers understand company performance and profitability on a product-by-product basis.”

The need for a new solution
“Within our US operation, we had multiple systems – some developed in-house and others from a variety of vendors, and all linked using custom point-to-point interfaces,” explains Russell Link. “And most of our subsidiaries were in a similar situation. As a result, support costs were high and managing the whole infrastructure was a complex proposition – so we definitely saw a need to move to a more strategic solution.

“As an additional issue, some of our hardware was reaching end-of-life, and our Oracle Financials applications were due for a major upgrade – which was going to be quite expensive.”

Choosing software and partners
The company looked at various centralized ERP packages, and ultimately chose SAP Business Suite as its target platform.

“We decided on SAP ERP Financials and a few other applications, such as SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, which would replace the functionality of our Oracle Financials applications and also help us optimize our financial accounting, reporting, planning and forecasting processes,” says Russell Link.

Creating a new infrastructure
The IBM SAP International Competence Center helped Epson America perform a detailed sizing exercise for the first set of SAP applications. As a result the company deployed an IBM Power 550 server, leveraging IBM PowerVM technology to run 18 IBM AIX virtualized logical partitions (LPARs) on eight POWER6 4.2Ghz processors. These LPARs support training, development, QA and production environments for SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse.

The IBM Power architecture
“We have been using IBM Power servers and their predecessors for many years, and we have developed a lot of respect for their reliability and performance in the AIX environment. The new POWER6 processors are a huge leap forwards for us – the ability to allocate resources to each partition dynamically is a big advantage, because it enables us to get the best possible performance from our hardware investment.”

The POWER6 architecture can also potentially simplify server maintenance through its live partition mobility (LPM) capability – which Epson America plans to implement into its IT operations in the near future. With LPM, if the production server needs to be shut down for maintenance, Epson America will be able to move its LPARs onto a second server seamlessly, with no interruption to availability and no disruption for business users. This will help to simplify maintenance and enable cross-server load balancing.

“Another benefit is lower running costs,” comments Russell Link. “The Power 550 is generations ahead of our old server in terms of energy efficiency, so we get much better performance with smaller electricity bills.”

Leveraging IBM BladeCenter technology
Epson has also deployed an IBM BladeCenter, which runs the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application in a Microsoft Windows environment on Intel Xeon processor-based IBM HS21 blade servers.

“We think SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation will be a better fit for our business than our previous forecasting solution,” says Russell Link. “The application helps us plan, budget, forecast, analyze and report on financial and operational matters, and provides a full audit trail that helps with compliance.”

The BladeCenter also forms part of the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator, using SUSE Linux and the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) to massively increase the speed of query processing for business reporting in the SAP application environment. The accelerator solution eliminates the need to create specific indexes to optimize individual queries, so it can save considerable time and effort whenever the company decides to create a new type of business report.

“The IBM BladeCenter architecture offers excellent performance for our SAP applications, and using it for the accelerator solution is a neat way to provide our business users with faster access to information,” says Russell Link. “One of the biggest benefits of the BladeCenter is flexibility: whenever we need extra processing capacity, we can simply plug in a new blade and achieve a near-linear increase in performance.”

Expandable IBM storage infrastructure
IBM System Storage DS4800 disk systems provide the basis for Epson’s storage area network for its SAP application environment. The DS4800 offers a highly expandable infrastructure for both high-speed fibre channel and high-capacity SATA disk storage, enabling an optimal combination of performance and cost-efficiency.

Smooth implementation
The hardware installation, data migration, and application deployment of Epson’s SAP ERP, SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator implementations were completed within six months. The whole infrastructure is now hosted and managed at a third-party data center.

“We did not have much SAP expertise in-house, so it was important for us to work with an experienced partner to help us through this project,” explains Russell Link. “We are working hard to increase our in-house skill levels; in the mean time, IBM and our hosting provider are doing an excellent job of supporting the environment.”

A firm foundation
With the financials, planning and business intelligence solutions in place, Epson America has laid the foundations for the transformation of its back-end systems from a group of siloed applications to a single, integrated solution from a single vendor.

Russell Link comments: “In the long term, having a single solution from a single vendor should deliver considerable cost savings through lower license fees and simplified maintenance and support. Equally, having a single system for all business data should help to improve data quality and reduce the amount of manual processing and data entry – which will help to reduce operational costs.”

From the point of view of business users, the new solution should ultimately deliver considerable improvements. For employees in the accounts department, it will be easier to collect and consolidate financial data with less manual data entry and spreadsheet work – helping them to focus on higher-value tasks. Equally, for executives and senior managers, faster access to a wider range of reports will facilitate decision-making and improve their ability to react effectively to changing market conditions.

“With this solution from SAP and IBM, we are on track to create a simple, standard solution that will manage all our major business processes – not just for our US operations, but for all our subsidiaries across the Americas. This will help us take a more global outlook and improve efficiencies across the whole group.”