Established in 1966, Mukki processes, pasteurizes, bottles and distributes dairy products to customers throughout the Tuscany region of Italy. Recently, Mukki merged with milk production plants in Pistoia and Livorno, and established a new factory in dell’Olmatello—enabling the company to produce a wide range of premium milk, cream, ice cream, butter, cheese and yogurt products.
At-a-Glance
After inheriting multiple financial planning and accounting solutions from a series of recent mergers, Mukki set out to modernize its IT infrastructure by migrating its mission-critical applications to SAP S/4HANA. The company deployed its new SAP environment on IBM Power Systems servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications to achieve consistent performance, always-on availability and simplified system management.
The Challenge
Producing fresh, nutritious and delicious dairy products requires expertise, careful planning and close cooperation with a large network of dairy farms and artisanal manufacturers. As one of the longest-established dairy companies in Tuscany, Mukki knows that the recipe for commercial success must be continually adapted to meet the changing demands of consumers.
Stefano Ricci, CIO at Mukki, begins: “Over the past few years, we have expanded our operations by welcoming more milk producers and farms into our cooperative. As we acquired new companies, we also inherited their planning, accounting and finance systems. As a result, our core finance systems and the underlying infrastructure grew in complexity, which in turn made system maintenance increasingly time-consuming and costly.”
To reduce complexity, Mukki decided to modernize and consolidate the core systems supporting its strategic operations: a move that would help the company to strengthen business continuity and optimize resource management.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server High Availability Extension gives us the robust failover and replication tools we need to keep our most critical systems running 24/7”
SUSE Solution
To simplify its operations, Mukki migrated its core planning, accounting and finance applications to SAP S/4HANA on two IBM Power Systems H922 servers, equipped with IBM POWER9 processors running SLES for SAP Applications.
Mukki enlisted the help of SAP Gold Partner VAR BMS to implement six instances of SLES for SAP Applications: three instances of the operating system were configured for the SAP S/4HANA application servers; and the remaining instances were dedicated to the company’s SAP HANA database.
“SUSE solutions came highly recommended by our business partner, VAR BMS,” says Ricci. “SLES for SAP Applications stood apart from other operating systems due to its inherent compatibility with IBM and SAP solutions, and the rich customization features it offers. We were especially impressed that we could easily integrate SLES with IBM PowerVM, which makes it easy to consolidate our workloads and manage multiple virtual environments from a single point of control.”
To keep its group financial planning and accounting processes running smoothly, Mukki also worked with VAR BMS to implement the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) High Availability Extension, a bundled component with SLES for SAP Applications.
“Processing millions of liters of milk and milk-based products requires us to keep our planning, production and accounting systems running around the clock, so any unplanned disruption can have a costly impact,” explains Ricci. “SLE High Availability Extension gives us the robust failover and replication tools we need to keep our most critical systems running 24/7.”
The Results
By moving its core finance and accounting applications to SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems servers with SLES for SAP Applications, Mukki has reduced system complexity while also boosting efficiency.
“Replacing dozens of finance and accounting systems with a single solution based on SAP S/4HANA has made running our daily operations much easier,” comments Ricci. “And thanks to SLES, we can manage and maintain all of our core SAP applications much more efficiently while making better use of our internal IT resources.”
Since migrating to SLES for SAP Applications, Mukki has enjoyed consistently high application performance and has improved the resiliency of its mission-critical systems.
Using the Virtual Persistent Memory (vPMEM) feature of the IBM PowerVM hypervisor, Mukki can restart critical databases faster following planned maintenance or unplanned outages, as it is no longer necessary to reload large amounts of data from disk into memory.
“Thanks to the SLE High Availability Extension, we have practically eliminated unplanned downtime,” says Ricci. “The SUSE solution provides rapid, reliable recovery and failover options for our most important systems, especially in conjunction with vPMEM. And with SUSE providing ongoing support for our critical systems, we can rest assured that any issues that may arise in the future can be resolved swiftly and effectively.”
Ricci concludes: “With reliable, performant and easy-to-manage IT systems underpinning core activities such as group accounting and financial planning, we are much better placed to continue expanding our operations and can dedicate more resources to developing new products.”
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