Petronash Logo
Industry: Manufacturing & Engineering
Location: United Arab Emirates
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Petronash boosts efficiency and market agility with SUSE

Highlights

  • Cuts reporting times by 99.9%.
  • Enables quicker, better-informed financial decisions.
  • Drives efficient business processes.
  • Builds redundancy for business-critical applications.

Products

Founded in 2000, Petronash is an engineering and manufacturing company specializing in equipment for the oil and gas industry. Headquartered in Dubai, Petronash employs approximately 900 people worldwide, including more than
200 engineers and R&D personnel. Petronash owns world-class manufacturing facilities in the USA, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and it provides an impressive range of after-sale services.

At-a-Glance

With three manufacturing plants, one engineering office and hundreds of employees to coordinate, Petronash needs to make well-informed financial decisions as quickly as possible. With its legacy systems going out of support, Petronash took the opportunity to upgrade to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. Now, the company can achieve levels of system performance and reporting that previously took days in a matter of minutes, boosting efficiency and market agility.

The Challenge

With hundreds of employees producing complex technical equipment, Petronash needs to make informed business decisions as quickly as possible, drawing on detailed figures about what products are selling and where. However, the company’s existing IT infrastructure was slowing down decision-making.

Sanjay Mistry, Manager of IT at Petronash, said: “Our reporting was less efficient than we wanted it to be. It would usually take us two or three days to generate the reports needed for monthly management meetings. We were spending a lot of time just on creating reports, which left less time to actually act on the information they contained.”

To increase system performance, Petronash decided to upgrade its ageing legacy systems.

“Our IT infrastructure was nearly seven years old at that point, and one of our vendors was dropping support for a key solution,” Sanjay Mistry said. “We saw this as an opportunity to improve our SAP reporting and overall system performance, so we began searching for a rapid and reliable system, and an efficient database on which to run our existing SAP ERP applications.”

“Since implementing SAP HANA on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications we can run reports that used to take up to three days in just two minutes. That is nearly a hundred times faster than before.”

SUSE Solution

After evaluating competing solutions from a number of enterprise providers, Petronash opted for the latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications running on cutting-edge Fujitsu hardware. In addition, the business transitioned to SAP HANA, an in-memory, columnoriented, relational database management system.

“We were very impressed with the SAP-specific-tuning of the SUSE solution,” said Sanjay Mistry. “The clustering solution for SAP was efficient, low-cost and approved by SAP. It also offered a degree of flexibility and efficiency far in advance of other providers we considered. The SUSE team were diligent throughout the proof-of-concept phase, and provided a superb test environment.”

Petronash was impressed with the SUSE team’s support in helping the company make the transition to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

“The migration process was extremely smooth,” said Sanjay Mistry. “With the SUSE team’s help, we were able to get the new SAP HANA environment up and running in just one month. This was hugely valuable, as it enabled us to achieve a near-immediate return on our investment.” The company was also satisfied with its migration to new Fujitsu hardware.

“We saw real value for money in the level of support Fujitsu offered,” said Sanjay Mistry. “This is another long-term investment in our IT infrastructure, and it works in perfect tandem with SAP HANA, as well as our existing SAP ERP applications. At the same time, we decided to adopt SAP Fiori mobile applications, to give our employees more flexibility.”

The Results

Since adopting SLES for SAP Applications and the SAP HANA database, Petronash has drastically reduced the amount of time employees spend generating reports, resulting in faster and better-informed business decisions.

"The impacts of these solutions have been transformative for Petronash," said Sanjay Mistry. "We used to spend so much time on reporting, but since implementing SAP HANA on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications we can run reports that used to take up to three days in just two minutes. That is nearly a hundred times faster than before. We can now respond to changing market trends more rapidly, and can deliver the goods to our customers more efficiently."

Petronash has seen further time savings after implementing SAP Fiori mobile apps across its manufacturing plants, and is especially satisfied with the low-cost redundancy solutions Fiori offers.

Mistry says, "We have just started using SAP Fiori, meaning staff at our manufacturing plants can now run key security processes remotely. This has helped to speed up approvals and slash wait times for our manufacturing arm."

"Overall, the SUSE solutions have helped us trim the fat off our business processes. Looking ahead, we are planning to upgrade to the newest version of SAP S/4 HANA in the coming months, and we are confident that our SUSE operating system will continue to help us maximize efficiency in the future."