Leading manufacturer boosts on-time deliveries to 90 percent

Meeting the challenges of growth

With its number of orders rising, a leading Indonesian manufacturer of plastics and packaging found it was unable to maintain the high level of on-time deliveries that its customers had come to expect. As a company spokesperson explains, “Our business goal is for 90 percent of all our orders to be delivered on time. However, as the number of orders began to rise, it became clear that our legacy hardware was not powerful enough to help us to continue to meet this target – at 80 percent, our on-time delivery rates were simply too low.”

Because the manufacturer’s legacy Sun hardware was not offering sufficient performance for the company’s mission-critical SAP applications, other business processes had also slowed significantly. “Our response times were frustratingly slow,” says a company spokesperson. “It used to take up to eight hours each day to create production orders for the production lines, which was harming our business efficiency. Getting stock figure reports took over two hours, reducing our visibility of stock and control over costs.”

“As a result of all of these factors, it was difficult to react to changes in order tempo, get visibility of our stock levels, and, most importantly, to schedule deliveries on time.”

In addition to its business efficiency pain point, the manufacturer wanted to strengthen its disaster recovery capability. “In addition to being extremely slow, our legacy disaster recovery sever had only 25 percent of the capacity of the production server, making failover in the event of a primary hardware failure impossible,” continues the company spokesperson. “Due to the nature of our business, we require 24/7 system availability to keep up with all of our customer orders. Without the SAP system, our business processes would grind to a halt, so not having the ability to fail over to a disaster recovery site presented a potential business risk.”

Choosing a powerful solution

The company engaged IBM to design, install and maintain a total IT solution. “We chose IBM because we were impressed by their global presence and excellent reputation for delivering powerful, cost-effective solutions,” says a company spokesman. “The IBM team worked with us to understand the future direction of our business, and the solution they came back to us with really showed that they had that in mind. We were unhappy with the support we received for our legacy system, so we were very reassured that the IBM team showed genuine interest in how our business works.”

An IBM team implemented two IBM Power 740 Express servers at geographically distant sites connected by a microwave link. IBM Power 740 servers were chosen for the exceptional performance of their POWER7® processor technology, which makes it possible for applications to run faster using fewer system resources. Further, by leveraging the energy management technologies of the POWER7 architecture, the company can benefit from high performance with a low environmental footprint.

To ensure high availability, data is replicated between both sites, meaning that production can be switched to the disaster recovery server if the production environment suffers an outage. IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager software was installed to perform full backups first to an IBM System Storage® DS5020 Express, and then to an IBM System Storage TS3100 Tape Library Express unit, ensuring maximum data resiliency.

The team then upgraded the company’s Oracle database from version 9 to version 10 and migrated its SAP applications from the legacy operating system to IBM AIX® version 6.

The IBM System Storage DS5020 Express allows the manufacturer to avoid over-configuration, as the unit’s modular design ensures simple ‘pay-as-you-grow’ scalability when storage requirements change. Owing to this high degree of flexibility, the company is able to maximize the cost-benefits of its hardware by spending only on the amount of storage it requires.

“The largest window we could offer the IBM team to carry out their work was only six hours,” says a company spokesman. “Despite the complexity of the migration, the IBM team completed the task within the allocated time, and we were very impressed by their performance.”

Accelerating production planning by 80 percent

Since the implementation of its IBM solution, the company has achieved its business goal of improving the efficiency of its business processes. “We have seen a 70 percent boost in performance in our production environment,” says a company spokesperson. “As a direct result, our production order planning now takes one hour per day – over 80 percent faster than before – and stock reports can be generated in just 20 minutes. Thanks to these massive improvements in our efficiency, we have increased our percentage of on-time deliveries to over 90 percent, actually surpassing our original target.”

Because the company’s disaster recovery server is now equally as powerful as its production server, the company can fail over within two hours in the event of a production server failure, greatly reducing business risk.

A vision for the future

Thanks to the IBM and SAP solution, the manufacturer is empowered to drive the continuous improvement of its business through more efficient management and integration of its information. By leveraging trusted information available from the SAP applications, the company has achieved significant productivity gains that have directly resulted in lower costs and higher customer satisfaction. Using IT-led business optimization, the company has gained the agility and efficiency it needed to outperform its competition.

“With the help of IBM, we have made some major improvements to our business, but there is still more we want to achieve,” concludes the company spokesperson. “We are shortly due to begin an upgrade to SAP ERP as part of a wider strategy to simplify our business processes. By continuing our strong collaboration with IBM and SAP, we are confident that we can gain the deep insights we need to further boost our working efficiency, take on new business, and, ultimately, drive the company on to greater levels of profitability than would have been possible in the past.”

For more information

To learn more about IBM solutions, contact your IBM sales representative or visit: ibm.com