Pratibha Syntex chooses IBM for its SAP landscape

Founded in 1997, Pratibha Syntex Pvt. Ltd. is a vertically integrated textile business with activities across cotton farming, spinning, knitting, dyeing and garment manufacture. Located in Indore, in the Madhya Pradesh state of India, Pratibha Syntex has approximately 60,000 acres of cotton fields and produces 100,000 garments daily. The company holds an ISO 9001:2000 quality certification from the Bureau of Indian Standards and generates annual revenues in excess of US$125 million.

To manage the growing diversity of its business models and processes, the firm chose to implement SAP ERP software, as Aditya Goyal, Executive Director, explains: “Across our three core divisions—yarn, fabric and garments—the activities we undertake are very different, as are the business models. SAP ERP software has enabled us to manage all of that diversity and gain a clear view of all operations within a single platform.”

With further expansion of the business, and with increasing pressure to meet tighter delivery deadlines from clients, Pratibha Syntex needed to upgrade its SAP ERP platform. “Our operations had grown, and the velocity of operations had grown too,” recalls Goyal. “We needed to upgrade to the latest release of SAP ERP in order to take advantage of new functionality and support for Unicode, and our existing hardware platform was no longer powerful enough. By selecting IBM System x3650 and IBM BladeCenter servers, we gained a robust, cost-effective platform that offers excellent performance and proven scalability for our future requirements.”

Selecting System x
Among the key requirements for the new server platform were reliability and scalability. At that time, Pratibha Syntex was expanding from one manufacturing location to four, and the company anticipated continued growth in output, employee numbers and locations. Goyal comments, “The number of transactions on our SAP ERP system was growing fast—partly because of the general growth of the business and its output, and partly because we were capturing more detailed information for analysis. As we need real-time support for our manufacturing facilities, it was vital to select a server platform that could ensure good performance and availability even as the volume of data grew.”

Pratibha Syntex deployed two IBM System x3650 servers running Microsoft Windows Server to support the main instance of SAP ERP. To run the SAP application servers, Pratibha Syntex deployed an IBM BladeCenter E chassis with seven blades. All of the servers use powerful and efficient Intel Xeon processors. Data storage is handled by an IBM System Storage DS4700 Express, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is used to back up and restore data. The hardware is housed at Pratibha Syntex's main production site, and data is backed up to a smaller secondary data center in another manufacturing facility to provide a disaster recovery option. All manufacturing facilities have dual redundant communication links to the SAP systems, and the x3650 servers use Windows clustering for high availability.

“At the time we deployed the IBM System x3650 and BladeCenter servers, our annual revenues were approximately US $50 million,” says Goyal. “Today, they are more than US $125 million, and we have added a further two manufacturing facilities. Throughout our rapid growth, our IT systems have never been a bottleneck—we are extremely satisfied with the quality of the IBM servers. Equally, we have considerably expanded the original servers to handle our growing business, so their scalability is proven as far as we are concerned.”

Comprehensive ERP
Pratibha Syntex makes heavy use of the core SAP ERP functionality, including financial accounting, cost controlling and materials management, and is looking at deploying SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) to improve the efficiency of its extended supply chain. The company also uses SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse running on IBM BladeCenter to provide business reporting and analytics.

“Each time we deploy a new module in SAP ERP, we evaluate the available best practices and templates from SAP, see how well they fit our requirements, and use them as appropriate,” says Goyal. “Where the fit is less good, we develop our own approaches. Over the years, SAP ERP has become an absolutely critical system for the company: no data processing takes place outside SAP any longer. We're now seriously pursuing our SAP HR agenda, looking to set up KPIs to help us develop our human capital and ensure that all our investments deliver value.”

Fitting solutions
Although the IBM server and storage infrastructure is owned and hosted by Pratibha Syntex, its management is outsourced to Softwin Technologies, an established specialist in supporting ERP solutions. “Some Softwin staff are seconded to our data center, while others provide off-site support. The partnership is highly successful and commercially beneficial for both sides.”

Softwin supports the IBM infrastructure and provides SAP Basis support, managing the overall framework and implementing changes and new requirements. Softwin also advises Pratibha Syntex on new functionality available from SAP, using its experience of deploying the entire SAP suite to identify areas where its client can achieve improved outcomes.

“Thanks to their highly integrated approach and hands-on way of working, Softwin has built an excellent understanding of our corporate character and our operations,” says Goyal. “This translates into solutions that really work in line with how our organization is structured. As a growing organization—in terms of products, operations and geographies—there are countless new things to think about every month. Softwin helps us to map our requirements to the appropriate technology solutions.”

Avoiding downtime
With IBM System x3650 and IBM BladeCenter servers powering its SAP ERP solution, Pratibha Syntex has a stable, cost-effective and scalable platform for managing its growing business. “As a manufacturing business, any unplanned system downtime could be extremely financially damaging to us,” says Goyal. “With IBM System x and BladeCenter servers, we have had no issues whatsoever with downtime throughout several years of operations. In the background, the complexity of our business and the volume of transactional data has grown, yet this has had no negative impact on our operations, thanks to the reliability and robustness of the IBM servers.”