Learn about leading foodservice organization steering towards success. Enabling operational savings with IBM and SAP.With SAP and IBM, the result is an integrated, highly efficient business that serves its customers and delivers value to stakeholders.To know more, visit http://ibm.co/RKEeMO

1. IBM Sales and Distribution Professional Services
The foodservice industry represents an intensely competitive
marketplace, and there is constant pressure to reduce back-office and
administrative service costs.
One of the leading foodservice organizations in the UK uses SAP
Business Suite to manage its core financial, logistics, inventory,
personnel and payroll tasks. Its IT division – which itself is part of the
central finance division – is committed to continually finding better,
more cost-efficient ways to deliver services.
The company’s IT Team Leader says: “Any way to reduce direct
operational costs and to avoid future capital expenditure will always be
examined. For example, we look for ways to reduce software license
fees, to cut maintenance and support costs, and to bring down the
expenses associated with an expanding IT landscape. The business
imperative is to do more with less, and continue to achieve and surpass
our service levels and capabilities.”
Re-thinking the infrastructure
With plans to upgrade to the latest editions of the SAP applications,
the company was presented with an opportunity to re-think its
infrastructure strategy and software landscape, including its choice
of database. By consolidating to fewer, more powerful servers, per-
processor software license fees could be reduced, and new database
technology could offer significant cost-avoidance benefits through data
compression and improved performance.
The company’s systems support around 2,000 named users, with total
production data of some 4.1 TB, growing at 600 GB a year. The team
reviewed a range of vendor technologies, and chose to migrate from
Oracle databases to IBM DB2, with the SAP application landscape
running on IBM Power Systems servers.
“The driving forces behind the cost savings were the ability to
virtualize the Power Systems environments and reduce our database
license fees,” says the IT Team Leader. “By purchasing DB2 licenses
and support through SAP, we have saved more than £90,000 over three
years.”
“By implementing DB2 Deep Compression at the time of the
migration, we were able to reduce 7.5TB of data to 3.3TB, a decrease
of 56 percent. This produces immediate effects by saving on disk
Leading foodservice
organization steers
towards success
Enabling operational savings with IBM and SAP
Overview
Business Challenge
In the highly competitive foodservice
sector, it is essential to reduce
administrative overheads. The challenge
is always to improve business efficiency
and enhance service delivery while
reducing infrastructure investments,
cutting software license fees and
decreasing operational maintenance
expenses.
Solution
A leading foodservice organization
consolidated to IBM®
Power Systems™
servers and migrated to IBM DB2®
,
using Deep Compression to reduce data
volumes by 56 percent. The company
implemented IBM Storwize®
V7000
storage systems to create a fully
virtualized, integrated data storage
landscape. Subsequently, the company
upgraded to the latest SAP ERP
components, including financials,
controlling, materials management, sales
and distribution, human resources, and
payroll, using IBM WebSphere®
Portal
to provide access for its hundreds of
operational units across the UK.

2. IBM Sales and Distribution Professional Services
and tape capacity requirements, enabling faster backup and restore
processes, and reducing power requirements, as we now require
fewer disks. By minimizing direct expenditure on additional storage
hardware, we can maintain a simple SAN landscape with fewer devices
and lower maintenance costs.”
Consolidation through virtualization
The foodservice organization has consolidated its SAP applications
to just three IBM Power Systems servers, running multiple logical
partitions (LPARs) to create virtual servers for the SAP applications.
Using LPARs enables the company to allocate processor, memory and
network resources to each SAP application as necessary.
In practice, the organization uses a technique known as ‘over-
commitment’, where more resources are assigned to the LPARs
collectively than are physically available in total. Because the peak
workload occurs at different times for each LPAR, the applications
are able to use the maximum resource allowances to ensure the best
possible performance, and then release resources back to the shared
pool for use by other LPARs.
“The combination of the LPAR technology and planned over-
commitment means that our company is able to exploit the maximum
processing efficiency from its investments,” says the IT Team Leader.
“Again, this allows us to avoid expenditure on additional processing
capacity by allowing us to manage workload in the most efficient
manner with existing resources.”
Data is stored on a newly implemented IBM Storwize V7000 and
existing IBM System Storage®
DS8100 and DS5300 devices. The IBM
Storwize V7000 incorporates innovative storage efficiency technologies
typically found only in enterprise-class systems, integrated into a
compact, modular design. The solution simplifies management with a
groundbreaking GUI that is both powerful and easy to use, designed
to help improve storage performance, efficiency and utilization rates,
while improving storage administrator productivity. Preinstalled
software on the V7000 enables simplified provisioning, online data
migration, simplified application performance tuning and easy storage
tiering architecture.
“IBM was very helpful throughout the entire server and storage
consolidation process, and with the SAP application upgrade,” says
the IT Team Leader. “The process was painless, and we have full
confidence in IBM’s ability to support our ongoing transformation.
IBM fully understood our business objectives, and helped us reach
our goals by building the business case and executing each step of the
process quickly and efficiently.”
Business Benefits
• Saved more than £90,000 over
three years on database license and
maintenance fees.
• Saved £50,000 over three years
through lower development and test
landscape sizes requiring smaller
storage and processor capacities.
• Saved more than £90,000 on storage
hardware purchases with DB2 Deep
Compression.

3. IBM Sales and Distribution Professional Services
Rapid SAP software upgrade
With a simplified and optimized SAP application landscape migrated
to IBM DB2 and consolidated to IBM Power Systems servers, the
organization readied itself for a major SAP application upgrade across
all its business-critical components.
“With smaller database volumes and the ability to create new virtual
servers for SAP instances, we reduced the SAP upgrade time from
around 18 hours to less than a working day of eight hours,” says the
IT Team Leader. “The compressed database enabled us to complete
essential pre-migration backup more quickly, and we completed the
upgrade to the enhancement package for SAP ERP in less than a day.
This landscape includes a payroll system that supports 160,000 people,
so it is important to have these systems working.”
“The new Power, DB2 and SAP solutions perform considerably
better than before. DB2 compression delivers lower I/O and reduced
wait I/O, and as a result processor utilization has dropped. This
gives us capacity for growth without requiring new investments, and
performance has increased by around 20 percent.”
“Backup processes now complete in less than half of the previous time,
enabling us to return full processing capacity to production applications
more quickly. Additionally, the tape and disk storage devices can be
made available for other business areas more rapidly, contributing to
better asset utilization throughout the company.”
Integrating business operations
The enhanced SAP application landscape includes web access via
IBM WebSphere Portal technologies. This enables staff at each site
to login and self-manage much of their business operations, including
controlled access to the core human resources, payroll and sales
applications, as well as an IT maintenance solution.
The IT Team Leader concludes, “With a diverse business across the
UK, it is important to be close to customers. IBM WebSphere Portal
connects us to centralized SAP applications rapidly and cost-effectively,
enabling all operational units to work from the same set of data. With
SAP and IBM, the result is an integrated, highly efficient business that
serves its customers and delivers value to stakeholders.”
For more information
To learn more about IBM solutions, contact your IBM sales
representative or visit: ibm.com
“The new Power, DB2 and
SAP solutions perform
considerably better than
before. DB2 compression
delivers lower I/O and
reduced wait I/O, and
as a result processor
utilization has dropped.
This gives us capacity for
growth without requiring
new investments, and
performance has
increased by around
20 percent.”
Solution Components
Software
• IBM®
AIX®
• IBM DB2®
version 9.5
• IBM WebSphere®
Portal
• SAP Business Suite including
financials, controlling, materials
management, sales and distribution,
and SAP ERP Human Capital
Management
• SAP enhancement package for
SAP ERP
Hardware
• IBM®
Power®
570 with POWER6®
processors
• IBM System Storage®
DS8100
• IBM System Storage DS5300
• IBM Storwize®
V7000

4. © Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Deutschland
IBM-Allee 1
D-71139 Ehningen
Germany
Produced in Germany
May 2012
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