Svendsen supercharges its growth prospects with the IBM i InstallOption for SAP Business All-in-One

Click here to read a German version of the case study.

Svendsen is a specialist distributor of DEUTZ engines, and also provides services for manufacturers such as Voith and Pleiger. Based in Stuttgart, the company focuses on southern Germany, and has subsidiaries in eastern Bavaria and Switzerland. Svendsen employs around 30 people and is growing rapidly – handling around 5,000 customer orders every year.

As a result of its lean staffing policies, Svendsen’s success depends on the individual expertise and productivity of every one of its employees. The company cannot afford to tie up its valuable human resources in administrative work or IT management.

Working with Kirbis, an IBM Business Partner, Svendsen had previously selected a simple, stable, highly reliable ERP solution based on SAP Business One. This solution was running in a Microsoft Windows environment on Intel processor-based servers from Fujitsu Siemens.

“SAP Business One is designed for the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises,” says Lutz Ilgner, CEO of Svendsen. “It is easy to use, highly stable, and no hassle to maintain. We didn’t even need to do any staff training before we started using the solution. However, as our business grew and transaction volumes kept rising, we gradually began to outgrow the solution, so we decided to move up to a larger-scale ERP package.”

The company chose to upgrade to an SAP Business All-in-One solution, based on SAP ECC 6.0 and pre-customized for the wholesale distribution industry.

“SAP Business All-in-One was almost an automatic choice for us – it is the obvious step-up from SAP Business One, and we were confident that Kirbis would do a good job on the implementation,” comments Lutz Ilgner. “The real debate was not about the application, but about the choice of operating environment.”

Staying on a Windows and Intel infrastructure would have required the purchase of three additional servers, complicating the implementation process and requiring considerable ongoing maintenance effort and expenditure.

“Kirbis advised us to consider IBM i and IBM Power Systems technologies,” explains Lutz Ilgner. “For the same price as the proposed Intel architecture, we purchased a single, more powerful and scalable Power Systems server, with all the characteristic advantages of IBM i: legendary reliability, high resilience against viruses, and the built-in IBM DB2 database.”

He adds: “Microsoft releases patches for Windows more often than most people change their underwear! IBM i requires much less administration and provides better availability. For example, with IBM i there is no need to reboot the server every time new software is installed – so changes can be made to the system during normal working hours without causing downtime.”

IBM i InstallOption for SAP Business All-in-One

Kirbis suggested leveraging the IBM i InstallOption for SAP Business All-in-One methodology, an approach that accelerates implementation by installing an entire preconfigured SAP application landscape, together with the IBM i operating systems and DB2 databases, onto the Power Systems hardware within a single day – nearly 80 per cent faster than traditional methods.

“In a major two-year project, it might not matter if you spend four or five days just installing the software – but for smaller projects like this, the ability to get the SAP applications running within 24 hours can make a huge difference,” comments Steffen Paulussen, Director of Sales and Marketing at Kirbis. “For example, we only scheduled 50 days of consultancy for the implementation at Svendsen; nearly 10 per cent of this time would have been effectively wasted if we had used a traditional installation method. So the IBM i InstallOption for SAP Business All-in-One methodology helped Kirbis deliver better value to Svendsen by giving the implementation team more time to focus on more important tasks.”

Lutz Ilgner comments: “Kirbis has delivered an excellent solution, on schedule and within our budget. Working with the Kirbis team has been a pleasure – they always seemed to understand our problems and find the right answers.”

High reliability, low maintenance

Since the implementation, Svendsen has been pleased with the performance and reliability of the IBM Power Systems environment and IBM i. The company has experienced no unscheduled downtime, and spends almost no time on the maintenance and administration of the hardware, operating system or DB2 database.

“Reliability is important because our business relies on the smooth operation of the SAP applications,” explains Lutz Ilgner. “Minimizing the administrative effort is equally critical. We need all our staff to be able to focus on our core business – we cannot afford their productivity to be hindered by the need to manage and maintain IT systems.”

He concludes: “For the thousands of small businesses like ours that form the backbone of the German economy, SAP Business All-in-One on IBM i and IBM Power Systems is an ideal solution – offering a simple, highly robust infrastructure that extracts the maximum benefit from the SAP applications while minimizing the amount of time and money that has to be spent on IT management.”