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Industry: Other
Location: Italy
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CIR food

Highlights

  • Reduces time taken to generate reports from 20 minutes to just seconds
  • Allows CIR food to manage huge amounts of data more quickly and cost-effectively
  • Supports better decision-making, helping the company to keep customer satisfaction high while controlling costs
  • Generated cost savings of 70%, which enabled CIR food to invest in SAP HANA running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Products

CIR food migrated its SAP landscape to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, improving performance and lowering costs by 70 percent—which allowed them to invest in SAP HANA.

Overview

CIR food is a food catering group based in Italy, with international operations in Belgium, Bulgaria, the United States and Vietnam. With 10 corporate offices, over 1,100 operating centres and over 11,500 employees in Italy alone, CIR food is a major player in the food catering industry.

The Challenge

Over the past decade, CIR food has expanded significantly, and has seen a dramatic increase in workloads and data volumes. The company identified an opportunity to analyse the information coming from all of its centres and use it to optimise resource use and adjust budgeting plans.

Giorgio Spaggiari, CTO at CIR food, said, "Our previous business intelligence and budgeting systems were entirely based on SAP applications running on UNIX operating system. As our business expanded and data volumes increased, we started to struggle to perform different kinds of analysis—processes were slow and generated inaccurate reports."

If CIR food wanted to serve an enlarged clientele without sacrificing on quality, it had to find a more flexible and expandable solution that could support its core SAP ERP and business intelligence applications.

What ultimately sealed our decision was the fact that SUSE Linux is SAP's unique platform for SAP HANA. As HANA is SAP's most innovative product, we chose to extend SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to the rest of our SAP landscape, which includes our huge ERP and business intelligence applications.
GIORGIO SPAGGIARI
CTO
CIR food

SUSE Solution

"Some of our 1,100 operating centres serve schools, while others are located in major Italian hospitals, like those in Bologna and Milan. Each of these units is like a small or medium sized company whose data and information on food deliveries, meals and budgeting is ultimately handled by us," said Giorgio Spaggiari.

"When we expanded our operations, and our workload increased, we noticed a high degree of inflexibility within our existing operating system. This prevented us from running proper analyses because the larger data volumes could not be processed as rapidly and reliably as required."

The company sought a more suitable operating system for its SAP environment, and when SUSE Business Partner BS Company showcased the advantages of moving to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, CIR food was convinced.

"What sealed our decision was the fact that SUSE Linux is SAP's unique platform for SAP HANA: as HANA—SAP's most innovative product—relies solely on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we decided to go the extra mile and centralise all our ERP and business intelligence applications on one single platform", said Giorgio Spaggiari.

The BS Company team—led by Massimo Montecchi—provided expert assistance and helped CIR food throughout the project, ensuring all processes and operations ran smoothly and rapidly.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications allows CIR food to leverage SAP Business Objects Predictive Analysis and perform analysis in two main areas: business forecasting and budget planning.

By migrating from UNIX to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CIR food was able to generate cost savings of around 70 percent—a side benefit which enabled the company to invest in SAP HANA.

Despite the complexity and scale of the project, the migration—carried out with strong support from BS Company—was completed smoothly within the original time frame and budget established, demonstrating the inherent ease of use of the SUSE platform, and the advantages of working with a certified SUSE partner like BS Company.

The Results

Thanks to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, CIR food is now able to leverage huge amounts of data in a more strategic way, faster and at lower costs.

"SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is easy to use, fast to deploy and offers integrated, top quality support from both SUSE and SAP," said Giorgio Spaggiari.

With the SAP HANA solution running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CIR food now generates reports in just a few seconds, compared to the 20 minutes required in the past. This enables the company to always have up to date and reliable information at hand to support its forecasting and budgeting plans.

Giorgio Spaggiari said, "Investing in SAP HANA was a tremendous boost to our operational insight. The platform allows us to collect historical data on our operations and analyse to gain a more objective view of our business performance. For instance, with the new insights obtained by leveraging SAP Predictive Analysis on SAP HANA supported by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we have noticed that in the month of February there is a significant peak in absent children from schools in Milan. This is due to illness, winter holidays and Carnival related events, and being aware of it enables us to adjust our resources and operations at that specific time of the year and for that specific customer in order to keep them satisfied without losing time and resources."