Grocery retail chain CarrefourSA began operating in Turkey in 1993; today, 500,000 people shop at 615 CarrefourSA store locations and its e-commerce site every day. CarrefourSA is a joint venture between Sabancı Holding and Carrefour.
At-a-Glance
To stay on top of Turkey’s competitive food retail market, CarrefourSA must offer great value and a seamless shopping experience. To power super-fast transactions and up-to-the-minute insights into its operations, the company deployed SAP solutions running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications—providing a high-performing, ultra-reliable platform to help lift its operations to new heights of success.
The Challenge
CarrefourSA is a giant in Turkey’s retail food market. The company’s extensive operations bring with them huge transaction volumes and large amounts of data, which CarrefourSA must manage effectively to keep its business running smoothly.
Previously, CarrefourSA relied on multiple business systems to manage different aspects of its operations. As the company pursued an aggressive expansion program— aimed at growing its market presence and customer base—slow performance and poor integration with existing applications threatened to put the brakes on growth.
To solve the challenge, CarrefourSA decided to refresh its entire enterprise application landscape, introducing an integrated suite of SAP ERP solutions, together with SAP Business Warehouse (BW) powered by SAP HANA for ultra-fast analytics and reporting.
Namik Kuruca, IT operations manager at CarrefourSA, explains, “We knew that SAP solutions could help us keep pace with ever-growing business volumes and provide the deep insight we require to support smarter sales, distribution and stock management strategies.
“Once we made the decision to deploy SAP, our attention immediately turned to finding the right server platform to support it. We were going to be running the entire business on SAP applications, so it was critical to select an operating system that could deliver the very best performance, reliability and availability.”
“We find SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to be the ideal platform for supporting our business-critical SAP environment; it delivers the performance, reliability and security we need to run at our best.”
SUSE Solution
To serve as its strategic operating system for the new SAP ERP and SAP HANA solutions, CarrefourSA chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications.
“SLES for SAP Applications was our first and only choice,” notes Kuruca. “We required an enterprise-class operating system that was certified by SAP, and SUSE was the only provider that we trusted to support our critical SAP systems.”
Working together with teams from SUSE and SAP, CarrefourSA made the move to a single instance of SAP ERP running on SLES for SAP Applications. Today, the company uses SAP solutions to manage nearly every aspect of the business, from financials and sales to inventory and warehouse operations.
In addition, CarrefourSA deployed two SAP BW on SAP HANA appliances—one with 25 terabytes (TB) of memory, and the other with 8 TB of memory. Both SAP HANA systems run on SLES for SAP Applications.
Kuruca recalls, “This project was a huge undertaking for CarrefourSA, involving many moving parts and complicated processes. We also continued to acquire and integrate new companies during the implementation, which added another layer of complexity. Thanks to the dedication of the project team, we completed a successful rollout of the SAP and SUSE solutions.”
Kuruca adds, “We have enjoyed smooth, reliable performance from SLES for SAP Applications ever since it has been in production. The system has definitely met our expectations.”
CarrefourSA counts on BIMSA—a leading IT services company based in Turkey—to provide day-to-day management of its SAP and SUSE environment. This helps the company keep the solutions running smoothly around the clock, while freeing up in-house IT teams for more strategic work.
The Results
By choosing SLES for SAP Applications, CarrefourSA can take advantage of an operating system that is optimized to consistently deliver high performance for SAP applications.
“We have a very large SAP environment and manage huge volumes of transactions,” notes Kuruca. “SLES for SAP Applications delivers excellent performance for our SAP workloads; we’ve never experienced any issues even during times of peak demand.”
With SAP and SUSE solutions driving its business processes, CarrefourSA has the solid foundation it needs to stay on track for success in a competitive market.
Kuruca concludes, “SAP solutions are indispensable to operations at CarrefourSA— as we continue to grow, we rely more and more on SAP to optimize our processes, drive well-informed decisions and shape a better customer experience. Equally, we find SLES for SAP Applications to be the ideal platform for supporting this business-critical SAP environment; it delivers the performance, reliability and security we need to run at our best.”