1. S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E C T I O N
S1
Reordering
Order Management
With industry-standard technology, Oracle® Database 10g, and Oracle
eBusiness Suite 11i, Dell’s IT group is accelerating processes, keeping orders
flowing smoothly, and cutting its total cost of IT ownership by 75 percent.
A
few years ago, IT executives at Dell were
making long-term plans for supporting the
company’s robust growth in the Europe,
Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region. They
looked carefully at what growing sales would
mean for their IT infrastructure—and they were
troubled by what they saw.
The central back-office system that supported
the processing of incoming customer orders for
EMEA was a powerful UNIX server—but it was
not powerful enough for Dell’s rapidly growing
business. The IT group’s projections showed that
the company’s volume of orders would outstrip
the system’s capacity in just over two years. “The
system had limits in terms of the throughput it
could achieve, and there was little room left for
growth,” says Liam McCarthy, production support
manager at Dell IT EMEA. “We calculated that it
Built for speed: With
its new standards-based
platform, Dell’s EMEA
region has cut order-
processing time from four
hours to less than one.
2. could ultimately handle about 25,000
orders a day, and no matter what we did,
it wasn’t going to be able to scale. And
we had requirements from the business
in terms of the transactional volumes that
would grow far beyond that.”
In addition to the looming capacity
gap, there were other problems. The sys-
tem handled computing tasks in batches,
rather than real time. As a result, says
Dragan Vuksanovic, architecture lead at
Dell IT EMEA, “there were fundamental
problems with the velocity of key trans-
actions, which of course is very important
to the Dell direct model, and to customer
satisfaction. We need to get incoming
orders processed through the system to
fulfillment within an hour, and we could
see that we were going to have increas-
ing trouble achieving that service level.
So we realized that it would be very dif-
ficult to go on with this platform.”
There was a time when Dell’s course
of action would have been more or less
predetermined: Replace the large UNIX
box with an even larger one. But Dell’s IT
executives felt that there were intrinsic
shortcomings with this kind of single-
server, proprietary architecture, such as
high licensing and maintenance costs—
and scaling to a larger UNIX server would
be relatively expensive, as well. At the
same time, the group wanted more relia-
bility and flexibility in IT to better support
the business, and speed up processes
as cost-effectively as possible. “Unless
we could meet these challenges, our
continued growth in EMEA would be
jeopardized,” says Pat Leahy, director of
Dell IT EMEA. “Our ability to process and
deliver orders to our customers with the
velocity they have come to expect from
Dell would be affected. So we needed
a different approach.”
Getting on the grid
Dell’s IT group explored a number of
potential solutions and weighed the
projected return on investment of each.
Ultimately, this process took them to
an entirely different kind of infrastruc-
ture—a grid architecture based on
standard Intel-based Dell™ PowerEdge™
servers, running Oracle Database 10g
with Oracle Real Application Clusters
(Oracle RAC), Oracle eBusiness Suite 11i,
and Red Hat Linux®
.
With an eye toward the vital impor-
tance of the system and the large work-
loads it would have to handle, the IT
group planned the implementation care-
fully, using an innovative conference
room pilot methodology that let IT archi-
tects, developers, and people from the
business side work together with several
iterations of the system to fine-tune and
test the configuration, processes, and
procedures. “IT and our business part-
ners were able to work side by side,
right from the beginning. That was key,
because it helped ensure that the system
really supported the business,” says
Henrique Manhao, program manager
at Dell IT EMEA. With that close col-
laboration, the team was able to not only
support existing business processes, but
also reengineer and streamline many of
the processes involved in the customer
order life cycle.
Dell also worked closely with Oracle
support and development experts
throughout the implementation. The
S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E C T I O N
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Dell EMEA’s Solution
at a Glance
Business system
Critical back-office order-management
system:
• Supporting operations
in 23 countries
• Ability to handle more than 80,000
orders per day
• Ability to process 400,000 order
lines per hour
• One of the world’s largest order-
management systems running
on Oracle
Old environment
Sun®
Solaris UNIX server
New environment
• Dell PowerEdge servers
• Oracle Database 10g with
Oracle Real Application Clusters
• Oracle eBusiness Suite 11i
• Dell/EMC storage devices
• Oracle Application Server 10g
Benefits
• Consolidation of multiple
applications
• Processing throughput increased
by at least 100 percent
• Invoicing time reduced 66 percent
• Order-processing time cut from
four hours to less than one
• Enablement of new approaches
to the market
• Total cost of IT ownership reduced
75 percent
• Annualized business benefit
of more than $18 million
“People have paid
a growing amount of attention
to grids and clusters in the
Oracle database world, but
the idea was new in the
applications world.… So we
partnered very closely with
Oracle to make it all work.”
—Dragan Vuksanovic,
architecture lead, Dell IT EMEA
3. EMEA group was able to draw on its
experience with a project called GEDIS—
a Dell and Oracle cluster platform that
the group had implemented previously
to handle the front end of the order-
management process. This new effort
built on the experience from that project
to take the grid concept further, says
Dragan Vuksanovic. “People have paid
a growing amount of attention to grids
and clusters in the Oracle database
world, but the idea was new in the appli-
cations world. There were no similar
implementations in place anywhere at
that time. So we partnered very closely
with Oracle to make it all work.” When
design and testing was completed, Dell
rolled out the new system in stages to
23 business units over a 12-month period;
overall, the entire implementation, from
concept to completion, took two years.
Now, the EMEA back-office order-
management system runs on a seven-
node cluster of Dell PowerEdge servers,
with Oracle Grid Control tools being used
to monitor and manage the cluster, and
Oracle J2EE Application Server delivering
an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
platform to support system integration.
This architecture offers high levels
of availability and reliability—which of
course are basic requirements for such a
critical system. “With the cluster, we can
afford to take down two or three nodes at
a time without any loss of functionality,”
says Andy Blay, lead production DBA at
Dell IT EMEA. Individual nodes can be
brought down one at a time for mainte-
nance without affecting the operation of
the overall system—a far cry from the old
approach, in which the entire UNIX server
had to be taken down for maintenance.
In addition, a backup site with another
seven-node cluster of Dell servers can
take over if the entire main data center
goes down.
The Dell and Oracle platform also
provides the high levels of performance
needed to handle the company’s growing
workloads. Where the legacy system
could handle about 25,000 orders per day
and 150,000 order lines per hour, the new
platform can process more than 80,000
orders a day and 400,000 order lines
per hour. Based on total order lines pro-
cessed, the solution is one of the largest
order-management systems in the world
running on Oracle. It’s also the largest
Oracle eBusiness Suite Oracle RAC
implementation and one of the world’s
largest Linux/Oracle transactional data-
bases—and it is supporting one of the
most critical processes at Dell. “This
architecture quite clearly demonstrates
the power and value of the combination
of industry-standard servers, Linux, and
Oracle,” says Alan Goodall, infrastruc-
ture architect at Dell IT EMEA.
Cutting costs,
increasing opportunities
For the IT department, the Dell and Oracle
platform has helped rein in system and
maintenance costs, and it has provided
the flexibility needed to continue to meet
the evolving needs of the business. The
Dell and Oracle platform has also elimi-
nated the IT group’s concerns about
capacity constraints for the foreseeable
future, because the architecture supports
capacity and performance scaling
through the simple addition of more
nodes and storage.
The IT group has also been able to
consolidate a number of former third-
party applications onto the system,
which also helps keep costs down. “All
customer-facing documents—invoices,
order confirmation, and so on—are
processed on the platform,” says Camille
Voisin, lead business analyst at Dell IT
EMEA. Using Oracle XML Publisher, the
company produces and prints these
documents efficiently, in real time.
The move to the new architecture
has also had a clear, positive impact on
the business. For example, the platform,
in combination with the front-end GEDIS
platform, has enabled Dell to consolidate
its once-fragmented quote-to-collect
processes across the 23 countries in
its EMEA operations into one common,
standard process. The Dell and Oracle
platform has also shortened cycle times
for a number of processes. Invoicing
time has been reduced 66 percent to
one hour; orders are now processed in
less than an hour rather than four hours;
and information is exchanged across
S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E C T I O N
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“This is a wonderful
example of technology
enabling not only growth and
improvement in our existing
lines of business, but also
entirely new business
lines that would not have
been possible using our
legacy systems.”
—Pat Leahy,
director, Dell IT EMEA
