Sokołów S.A. responds to market changes with up-to-the-minute business insights

Destaques

  • Enhanced performance, with some reports available tens of times faster.
  • Reduced database size by 74 percent, removing barriers to growth.
  • Slashed operational and maintenance costs.
  • Lowered risk through open technology and improved access to IT support.

Produtos

Sokołów S.A. produces 1,100 tonnes of high-quality meat, cold cuts, ready-made dishes and canned goods on average each day. Dominating the Polish market, the company also serves international customers, particularly within the European Union.

At-a-Glance

To keep its extensive distribution network running seamlessly, meat product company, Sokołów, needs timely insight into its operations. The company rejuvenated a sluggish reporting system by deploying SAP BW on SAP HANA running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications. The move dramatically boosted performance, arming Sokołów with the information it needs to respond to changes in the marketplace extremely quickly, while reducing costs and risk.

O desafio

To manufacture and sell high-quality food products at a large scale, Sokołów must anticipate and react fast to changes in demand. The company’s operational data is a rich mine of information that can help managers make optimal decisions — but only if accurate insights are available at sufficient speed.

Mariusz Mazurczak, deputy director of IT at Sokołów S.A., says: “As our database expanded alongside our business, we were experiencing issues with performance and stability. Reports could take days to generate, and most frustrating of all, some would crash just before they were completed.”

The company wanted to free its IT team from tending to its reporting and analytics platform and ensure it could serve the business with key information for decision making. It began seeking an alternative approach that could deliver the rapid business insight it needed to protect its market share.

“Our engineers told us to expect reports several times faster due to the move to SAP BW on SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Actually, performance has increased beyond that, with processes sped up at least 10 times in many cases.”

Solução SUSE

For Sokołów, the latest-generation SAP solutions were a natural choice to enable greater transparency, and it opted to deploy SAP BW on the SAP HANA database. With the smooth running of this software landscape, a critical factor in operational success, the company needed to find a reliable, high-performance platform to support it.

“When we investigated the optimal setup for the new environment, we discovered that SLES running on HPE servers was the platform recommended and fully supported by SAP,” says Mazurczak. “This fact, in addition to the positive reputation it has in the marketplace, persuaded us that it was the best and most stable configuration. Plus, with SLES, we get access to lots of great resources online, such as documentation, forums and FAQs.”

Sokołów soon became the operator of the largest SAP implementation in Poland, choosing to roll out the new SAP ECC environment on SAP HANA on SLES for SAP Applications to all its locations almost simultaneously. It later deployed SAP HR, also on the SUSE OS but not on SAP HANA.

“Our decision to undertake a big-bang implementation was seen as a bold and unprecedented step at the time because of the scale involved, but we knew that we could do it with the right partners,” says Mazurczak. “We chose the combination of SAP, SUSE and HPE solutions because we were confident that these vendors could help us achieve a relatively painless migration. This was tested when we hit a roadblock during the rollout — and the response was great, with all three vendors coordinating behind the scenes to resolve the issue very quickly.”

Os resultados

As a result of the project, Sokołów dramatically accelerated reporting and analytics, helping the company equip key decision-makers with essential information.

“Our engineers told us to expect reports several times faster when we moved SAP BW to SAP HANA on SLES. Actually, performance has increased far beyond that, with processes sped up tens, hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of times. For example, a VAT report that used to take days to produce is now available in just a few hours, while another report is available 37 times faster than before!” says Mazurczak.

“In the past, business users were irritated by our reporting and analytics system, which took ages to produce results and kept crashing. Now, they are much more enthusiastic, helping us to incorporate business insights more deeply into everyday operations for better outcomes.”

Sokołów is also benefiting from a range of efficiencies enabled by the new solutions, helping the company clear the path to growth.

“We have reduced our database size by 74%, which translates into a significant reduction in storage requirements,” says Mazurczak. “This gives us greater headroom for expansion and lowers our costs. We are also making major savings on maintenance. Our IT teams can work more efficiently since they no longer have to spend so much time administering the system. All these add up to positive impact on our bottom line.”

By moving to a more open platform, Sokołów has reduced risk and put more resources at its IT team’s fingertips than ever before.

Mazurczak says: “There is so much great information about SUSE solutions available at the click of a button, helping us use them to their full potential as we support Sokołów in the next stage of its development.”