Englmayer Logo
Industry: Transportation
Location: Austria
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Englmayer leverages SUSE to deliver wide-ranging services for specific customer needs

Highlights

  • Delivers high performance, providing a solid platform for SAP HANA
  • Small footprint and easy management helps Englmayer handle new demands at low cost
  • Eliminates single points of failure to help ensure high availability

Products

G. Englmayer, Spedition GmbH is a leading transport and logistics company, offering customized and reliable international cargo delivery services. Headquartered in Wels, Austria, the company has a strong presence in Eastern Europe, with subsidiaries in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Englmayer employs more than 500 people and completes around 1.9 million deliveries annually.

At-a-Glance

To deliver efficient, reliable logistics services, Englmayer worked with technology partner, Axians ICT Austria, to refresh its business applications and move to SAP S/4HANA Finance, running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications. The modern, future-proof solution eliminates single points of failure and helps Englmayer to meet new customer demands quickly and easily. Thanks to the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) High Availability Extension, operations run smoothly without unplanned interruptions.

The Challenge

Englmayer specializes in providing tailormade services for its customers. The company’s broad portfolio ranges from standard cargo shipping to express services, supply chain solutions and warehouse logistics, as well as removals services.

Robert Hacker, head of IT at Englmayer, begins: “To customize our wide-ranging services to meet specific customer demands, we need to be able to adjust our business processes on the fly, so flexible IT systems are key. As our company continues to grow and we launch new services, our existing transportation management and finance systems began to slow us down. New requirements kept coming in, and it was becoming harder and harder to accommodate them.”

To ensure it could continue to meet evolving customer expectations, Englmayer set out to modernize its business applications.

“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications lets us run both the application server and database on a single instance, reducing the server footprint and minimizing operating costs.”

SUSE Solution

After evaluating its options, Englmayer chose to partner with Axians ICT Austria — an enterprise IT services provider with years of experience in the transportation and logistics industry.

“In addition to its extensive industry experience, Axians offered a high level of expertise in both transportation management and finance systems,” comments Hacker. “Efficient operations require close integration of the logistics system and the finance application. By working with a single partner, we were able to simplify the implementation of both systems.”

Following advice from Axians, Englmayer chose to replace its existing finance solution with the SAP S/4HANA Finance application, which is supported by the SAP HANA in-memory database. The entire SAP environment runs on the SLES for SAP Applications operating system on Fujitsu servers, distributed across two data centers.

“Axians recommended that we deploy SLES for SAP Applications to support our SAP HANA environment,” recalls Hacker. “The Axians team knows SLES for SAP Applications very well, and the fact it is specifically optimized for SAP software means it delivers excellent performance out of the box. As a fully managed service, Axians’ offering delivers excellent value for money.”

As part of its modernization drive, Englmayer implemented the Axians lbase Transport Management System (TMS) as the foundation for its day-to-day business operations. Axians provides both SAP S/4HANA Finance and lbase TMS as fully managed services running on SLES.

The Results

By taking advantage of SLES for SAP Applications and working with Axians, Englmayer was able to maintain a sharp focus on its core business challenges, while upgrading its business applications to a future-proof platform. Hacker remarks: “Running next-generation SAP S/4HANA applications on SLES means we can easily add new functionality, such as mobile features, to meet emerging business demands — enabling us to deliver a better service to our staff and customers.”

SLES for SAP Applications includes the SLE High Availability Extension, which helps Axians provide reliable services for Englmayer’s business-critical processes, ensuring smooth operations. Hacker explains: “Thanks to the SLE High Availability Extension, we have not experienced any downtime. The clustering solution enables Axians to manage the systems with ease and complete control. We eliminated a single point of failure in our IT architecture and can be confident that our SAP workloads will automatically be transferred to a second node immediately in the event of a disaster.”

He concludes: “We are very happy with the support from Axians. The team has delivered a reliable and future-proof SAP S/4HANA solution, which we plan to roll out across our subsidiaries to standardize operations and gain further efficiencies. SLES for SAP Applications lets us run both the application server and database on a single instance, reducing the server footprint and minimizing operating costs. Supported by Axians, the solution works seamlessly without any glitches, helping us to keep cargo moving and customers happy.”