Since 1995, Bereket Enerji has pioneered Turkey’s energy industry and secured its place in the sector by distributing 10% of Turkey’s electricity, counting on the expertise and dedication of 10,000 employees and business partners.
At-a-Glance
Bereket Enerji generates and delivers energy to citizens across Turkey. However, with aging, costly IT systems supporting its core processes, the company found that this legacy technology was draining time and resources from its central mission. By deploying SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications, Bereket Enerji is confident that it will be able to slash costs, boost performance and increase productivity — supporting its management team with the delivery of sustainable energy.
The Challenge
To deliver green, innovative energy to millions of people across Turkey, Bereket Energy needs to be highly efficient and keep costs to a minimum.
Mert Ece, Chief Information Officer at Bereket Energy, said: “Being successful in the liberalized, competitive Turkish energy market requires the ability to invest time and money into ground-breaking projects to identify and develop new sources of energy.
“However, when your core business processes are supported by legacy IT systems that have become slow and costly, this drains company focus and resources from that central mission. Our operations relied on a Netsis ERP system, which had become increasingly expensive to maintain, upgrade, and manage. Approximately 600 people use it, and the per-user licensing costs were becoming an unsustainable expense.
“We also wanted to reduce the number of preventable errors, and enhance service levels by adopting a solution that offered local, expert assistance.”
To actively support the management team’s goal to deliver even better energy solutions, the IT department at Bereket Energy began looking for new technology that would enable the business to run more efficiently and cost-effectively.
“Thanks to SUSE and SAP, we’ll be able to help the management team obtain an in-depth understanding of our customers and their needs — enabling them to deliver even better, more targeted energy solutions.”
SUSE Solution
Bereket Energy decided to adopt SAP S/4HANA applications built on the SAP HANA in-memory database. Mert Ece said: “SAP S/4HANA combines comprehensive ERP functionality with an efficient, flexible, real-time database platform.”
To support the new core system for its business, Bereket Energy wanted to choose an operating system that would offer exceptional stability, security and performance—together with ease of management to ensure low running costs. Mert Ece said: “We reviewed several options, and narrowed down our search to Red Hat and SUSE. In Turkey, SUSE is very popular—especially within the SAP community—and we knew we would be able to count on local, expert support.”
Bereket Enerji worked with business partner, BTC Turkiye, to deploy SLES for SAP Applications, running on ultra-stable, reliable and high-performing Huawei hardware. “We selected the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform for its performance, security, ease of management and cost-efficiency,” says Ece. “A major plus is the fact that SLES is the preferred operating system for SAP: this gives us great peace of mind that our operations are supported by the most suitable platform.”
The Results
As Bereket Energy continues its roll-out of the new SAP S/4HANA solutions, the company is already experiencing the benefits of choosing SLES for SAP Applications.
Mert Ece said: “The SUSE operating system is stable, reliable and user-friendly, and it offers us great performance. Its unmatched integration with our SAP environment makes us confident that we will be able to run our core business applications securely and reliably at all times. This, in turn, will help our management to achieve excellence in the delivery of energy services and solutions.
“In addition, SUSE offers much simpler licensing policies at a much more affordable price point compared to Microsoft, enabling us to save an estimated 80 percent on licensing costs. Thanks to this, we can allocate greater funds to support important projects for the generation and delivery of innovative energy services.”
Following the successful implementation of SLES for SAP Applications, Bereket Enerji is planning to replace other legacy applications with new functionality in SAP, thereby centralizing its business application landscape around SAP S/4HANA running on the SUSE operating system.
Working with SUSE and SAP has also paved the way for Bereket Energy’s visionary Internet of Things (IoT) project. Mert Ece said: “We gather lots of data from assets and customers, and we want to tap into this wealth of information in the future. We’re planning to store this data in our ERP system, and feed it back to the management/trading team, who will harness it to maximize productivity, optimize operations and boost customer service.
“Thanks to SUSE and SAP, we’ll be able to help the management team obtain an in-depth understanding of our customers and their needs—enabling them to deliver even better, more targeted energy solutions.”
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