Overview
The Challenge
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.
SUSE Solution
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 Energy worked with Business Partner BTC Turkiye to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 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,” said Mert Ece. “A major plus is the fact that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 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
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 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, Bereket Energy 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.”