Hindustan Motors Limited increases performance by 75 percent with IBM and SAP

Hindustan Motors Limited, the flagship venture of the multi-billion-dollar C. K. Birla Group, was established during the Indian pre-Independence era. Operations were moved in 1948 to Uttarpara in district Hooghly, West Bengal, where the company began the production of the iconic Ambassador model. Today, Hindustan Motors has technical collaboration with the Mitsubishi Motors Corporation of Japan, and, under license, produces premium passenger cars, including the Lancer Evolution X.

Performance bottlenecks limit efficiency
Hindustan Motors first felt the need for a solution when it encountered problems with its legacy HP system. As Mr Vijayakrishna, senior IT manager at Hindustan Motors Limited, explains: “In total, we have 125 SAP^® users in the company, with around 90-100 logged in concurrently. When the number of concurrent SAP users began to rise, we started to get a bottleneck effect in our storage system, which significantly reduced system access times. At its lowest ebb, our users were waiting up to two minutes per operation. Because of these delays, we weren’t able to deal with orders fast enough to meet our business goals – it simply wasn’t an acceptable situation.”

Hindustan Motors wanted to increase the efficiency of its workflow processes. In order to achieve this, the company needed to perform a full infrastructure refresh. The new infrastructure would be used to upgrade SAP^® ERP from version 4.6 to SAP^® ERP Central Component 6.0.

Choosing the right vendor
The company began the search for a vendor to provide its total IT solution. “We evaluated HP, Sun and IBM^® for servers and Oracle and IBM for databases,” says Mr Vijayakrishna. “Ultimately, we decided to go with IBM because we’d heard a lot of positive things about their hardware and Tivoli^® backup software, and were very impressed by the demonstration from the IBM team. We chose IBM DB2^® software over Oracle after SAP informed us that it was their preferred database software. Its price point was also more attractive than Oracle’s, which we saw as an added bonus.”

Hindustan Motors engaged IBM to build its new SAP environment. The IBM team implemented IBM Power^® 520 Express^® and IBM System x3650 servers running the IBM AIX^® operating system.

Storage is provided by an IBM System Storage^® DS4700 and managed by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. An IBM System Storage TS3200 Tape Library ensures all of the company’s mission-critical data is backed up. After the data from the legacy system was successfully migrated to the new environment, Hindustan Motors upgraded SAP 4.6 to SAP ERP Central Component 6.0.

“The implementation went extremely smoothly, and we were particularly impressed by the effort of the IBM team, who migrated the operating system from HP-UX to IBM AIX and database from IBM Informix to IBM DB2 more than 12 hours before the end of the 48 hour downtime window,” says Mr Vijayakrishna. “The team achieved all of this in the face of quite a unique challenge, as we literally hadn’t any space left on the old hardware. Because of this, the entire database migration was performed using only Network File System (NFS) protocol.”

After the implementation was complete, IBM provided comprehensive training services to Hindustan Motors’ in-house IT team, enabling them to perform the routine maintenance required to keep the system healthy.

Cutting access times in half
By choosing IBM to deliver its SAP solution, Hindustan Motors has gained the scalable, robust solution required to achieve its business targets. “After the solution went live, we experienced an immediate boost in performance,” says Mr Vijayakrishna. “Access times have been reduced from two minutes to just 30 seconds, an improvement of 75 percent. By giving our end users rapid access to the SAP system, we’ve increased our operational efficiency by around 40 percent. Today, we can process more orders in a shorter space of time, which is good for our business, and good for our customers.”

In addition to improving business efficiency, by installing IBM DB2 database software, Hindustan Motors has increased its data compression by 40 percent, reducing the need for physical expansion of storage in the future.

“DB2 is extremely easy to manage, and together with the improved performance we’ve gained from the IBM solution, we’ve managed to shorten our required backup window by one hour,” concludes says Mr Vijayakrishna. “We’re very satisfied with the solution. Thanks to IBM and the latest version of SAP, we’re now able to meet our business targets, and we’ve gained the confidence to install new SAP applications to augment our service offering in the future.”