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Leading chemicals manufacturer Boosts business performance with IBM and SAP
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Chemicals
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Discrete Manufacturing
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The leading chemicals manufacturer was facing challenges in gaining fast insight required to boost business performance and profitability due to staff and systems spread across many different business units. The company was also experiencing availability problems, often having to take the system offline for software upgrades, back-ups and patches. The company's SAP application user base was expected to grow by several thousand users due to internal reorganization, making capturing operational insights even more difficult. The company recognized the need to reduce downtime, and ensure high availability and reliability for users, and looked for a stable platform it could rely on to keep operations running smoothly around the clock.
About The Customer
The leading chemicals manufacturer produces and supplies paints, coatings and specialty chemicals to a wide range of industries and consumers around the world. The company serves customers all over the globe, who have come to expect high quality and value. To meet such high expectations, the company must ensure that every link in its operational chain runs as efficiently as possible. However, with staff and systems spread across many different business units, it was often a challenge to gain the fast insight required to boost business performance and profitability.
The Solution
To cut complexity, the leading chemicals manufacturer chose to consolidate all of its SAP instances to a single, central solution. The company ran a rigorous evaluation of potential solutions, ranking them according to the company’s specific requirements on reliability, performance, and cost. The company chose IBM Power Systems running IBM AIX to support DB2. IBM AIX software can run a whole year with only a few updates, enabling the company to keep the database and business processes running with far less scheduled downtime. Sourcing the database, operating system and hardware from a single vendor greatly simplified system management. With a single SAP ERP instance running on IBM DB2, the company has gained a high-performance, highly scalable and reliable centralized solution.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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