Discover the business benefits Hillarys achieved with S/4HANA on SUSE

Headquartered in Nottingham, Hillarys is the UK’s leading retailer, manufacturer and distributor of made-to-measure window coverings, with a market share of 26 per cent and annual turnover of £200 million. Hillary has led the way in using enterprise mobility to help achieve this since 2005, when sales advisors started using mobile applications to assist in home visits.

However, after a decade or so of growth and ongoing service innovation, the company’s IT systems were starting to struggle to keep up. Since mobile devices are key to their business, Hillary needed capable back-end systems to support them.

In order to accelerate customer service and give employees a more streamlined digital experience, Hillarys decided to upgrade from SAP ECC5 to SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA),  a set of fully integrated applications running on the SAP HANA in-memory, real-time data platform.

Read the full success story here

Hillarys decided to move to a flexible, open-source operating system to support SAP S/4HANA, and selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, the leading operating environment for SAP environments. Moreover, Hillarys broke new ground by being the first company to deploy version 12 of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in support of an SAP landscape.  With the solution in place, Hillarys uses the Page Cache Management feature in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to ensure high performance when working on large SAP HANA workloads.

The new IT infrastructure has significantly sped up Hillarys’ overnight data upload processes, getting new sales data into the data warehouse faster so that business analysts can report, analyze and act on information more quickly. Hillarys’ business has already benefited from highly available and consistently fast systems since migrating its SAP environment to SAP HANA, thanks in part to the high level of robustness and reliability provided by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

Since going live with SAP S/4HANA running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, Hillarys has also deployed SUSE Enterprise Storage™ and SUSE Manager.

Watch Hillarys’ presentation @ SAP SAPPHIRE 2017