Kyocera Mita achieves 1,000-fold increase in information delivery speed with IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator

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Kyocera Mita Corporation of Japan sells commercial document management and imaging systems, and manufactures office printers and digital copying machines. The group, which employs around 12,000 people, operates through 25 sales and service companies worldwide.

To deal with the speed of change in the digital imaging in business recent years, Kyocera Mita started a management information program designed to accelerate information delivery throughout the business. This “Visibility Project” was based on exploiting data contained in the company’s existing SAP system, designed to make information clearly understandable in real time and increase the accuracy of forecasting based on current trends.

Kyocera Mita has operated SAP ERP in its domestic offices, dealerships, and factories since April 2004, along with the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) technology platform.

“At that time, we were using SAP NetWeaver BW for reporting only. It was not yet deployed for data warehousing purposes,” says Tetsuya Mori, Head of the IT Management Department in the Corporate Strategy Planning Division of Kyocera Mita.

The goal was to introduce analytical reporting systems that would deliver aggregated business data to senior executives’ screens within 15 minutes of exceptional changes being detected. With the volume of data being processed, Kyocera Mita was unable to meet this target.

Katsumi Komaguchi, President of the company, says: “We wanted immediate access to the pertinent information, and the ability to take management decisions with the exact figures at our fingertips.”

Choosing the right partner

To meet this ambitious objective, Kyocera Mita introduced, for the first time in Japan, the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator. By greatly improving the processing speed for data analysis, thereby returning results more quickly to executives, Kyocera Mita greatly increased the value of its SAP NetWeaver BW solution to the business.

SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator is an analytical engine that makes it possible to greatly increase the performance of SAP NetWeaver BW, without expensive tuning or configuration changes.

Mr. Takayuki Umeda of the IT Department Information System Section 1, IT Management Department, Corporate Strategy Planning Division, Kyocera Mita, explains the reason for choosing IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator: “IBM, through its alliance with SAP, is highly knowledgeable about SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator. This factor, combined with IBM’s very deep understanding of Kyocera Mita through longstanding outsourcing contracts, gave us total confidence in selecting IBM as our strategic partner for the Visibility Project.”

Easy deployment

The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator comprises IBM BladeCenter and IBM System storage technologies, designed to provide a stable, highly scalable platform for the SAP software.

The IBM BladeCenter features six Intel Xeon processor-based HS20 blade servers for production and quality assurance, running the 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. The BladeCenter is attached to an IBM System Storage DS4700 Express disk array, storing a maximum of 3.8TB of data using the IBM General Parallel File System.

As the first user of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator in Japan, Kyocera Mita chose IBM for its global experience in defining processes for backup and restore, monitoring and fault detection. “SAP and IBM staff worked together checking off issues one by one, and connection to the SAP NetWeaver BW system was straightforward,” says Mr. Umeda. “The speed increased, and there was no need to adapt or tune either SAP NetWeaver BW or the new accelerator solution.”

Boosting the speed of reporting

Transactional data is constantly collected from Kyocera Mita’s global operations, producing an enormous volume of data to be processed by SAP NetWeaver BW. Previously, when the stock report and the major features stock report were processed, the standard SQL query would time-out and fail after 60 minutes.

After the switch to SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, results were returned in 1.04 seconds for the major features stock report and in 9.38 seconds for the full stock report – more than 3,000 times faster, a dramatic increase in performance. Massive improvements in the warehousing and shipping detail reports times were also achieved, from 420 seconds down to 1.5 seconds, almost 300 times faster.

Mr. Mori comments, “The ability to demonstrate such a clear improvement in performance – in some cases, hundreds or even thousands of times faster – means that the benefits of investing in the IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator are extremely easy to understand. If it hadn’t been for this solution, we might not have been able to successfully display data to management.”

A growing solution

Because the Visibility Project started on a small scale, only basic information is currently presented to management, and yet many requests for more information have already been received.

Mr. Mori says, “We would like to be able to provide specialized, department-specific information to various divisions. The IBM Systems solution for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator offers Kyocera Mita the ability to scale up rapidly and meet management requests easily, quickly and cost-effectively.”