Deploying HANA on a unified computing architecture has helped the company reduce report generation time from 15 hours to three minutes. By Harshal Kallyanpur
For the Essar Group, SAP solutions form an integral part of the IT infrastructure. The entire group has been running on ECC 6.0 ERP for a while now. The Group operates in six business verticals. The SAP system generates a humongous amount of data, which is processed for generating business reports. These are used by business managers for making informed decisions. The challenge lay in crunching this vast amount of data in a defined time frame.
“While we were able to get the operational reports from the BW warehouse, the real-time analytics was always a constraint due to the time taken to generate the report. We needed a solution that would help us react faster to events having an impact on operations, which was taking a lot of time. The business was looking to uncover trends and patterns in an ad-hoc, empowered manner and it wanted to improve planning, forecasting, financial closure,” commented N Jayantha Prabhu, CTO Essar Group.
These processes used to take a lot of time to complete as the previous approach was slow and it was unable to blend analytics with operations. However, the company also wanted to strengthen its existing investments in SAP software while gaining real-time visibility into businesses across verticals in such a manner that senior executives and employees would get a snapshot of the overall business at a group level.
After the launch of HANA, the Essar Group carried out a detailed POC to figure out if this database could cater to its business requirements.
Prabhu said, “As a large conglomerate, we see around 3 TB of data being processed for daily reporting. Online reporting is another major cause for concern. Having done the POC, we found that we could derive considerable benefits by adopting this solution—both for the organization and the business.”
After taking a call to implement HANA, the Group floated a technical specification inquiry to its major partners including HP, Cisco and IBM. “We did a detailed technical comparison of the proposals that we received and submitted it to the spend management team, which takes care of the commercial negotiations. We felt that Cisco offered a competitive price and a higher configuration and, therefore, decided to go with its Unifed Computing System (UCS),” added Prabhu.
While the organization faced some challenges on the solution delivery side, the overall implementation went smoothly. As the implementation was new, Essar took SAP Consultancy’s help; the Cisco and SAP teams worked together to help implement the solution. While the initial estimate was that it would take two weeks to deploy HANA on UCS, the project was concluded in a week’s time.
The HANA appliance is deployed on Cisco’s C460 M2 UCS solution, which is configured and optimized to host and run HANA. Essar’s UCS infrastructure sports four Intel Xeon E7-8867L 2.13 GHz processors that offer a total of 40 CPU cores, 512 GB of RAM and internal storage of about eight 300 GB drives totting up to a total usable storage of 2 TB,. Then there’s Fusion’s ioDrive Disk Flash, about 320 GB of which augments the internal RAM of 512 GB.
Implementing HANA in a traditional manner would have meant that the company would have had to go about selecting the right server, storage et al. The UCS solution, according to Prabhu, came with the necessary OS, applications and databases. All Essar had to do was implement and configure HANA on it. He believed that this was the factor that had contributed to bringing down the test and deployment cycle, as the underlying platform was integrated and designed to host and run the HANA environment.
Furthermore, as the UCS solution comes in a box, Prabhu observed that it reduced the implementation and management complexities and thereby reduced the overall TCO due to lesser hardware, testing and maintenance being required.
The deployment of HANA has provided the Essar group with many benefits. The solution has helped bring all relevant data to decision makers within seconds, in an understandable and user friendly format enabling decisions to be made in a jiffy. It has dramatically improved the existing planning, forecasting and price optimization processes by combining high-volume transactions and real-time analytics.
Prabhu said, “Reporting used to take a lot of time for us. It took us 15 hours in the past to generate a particular report. Today, after the HANA implementation, the same report is generated within three minutes.”
Additionally, Essar has selected mobility solutions from SAP along with the AFARIA mobile device management solution in order to mobilize its critical business functions and make data easily accessible on mobile devices to its workforce.
Observed Prabhu,”We wanted to augment our existing investment in SAP software in such a way that it would allow users to analyze data by customer, region or product irrespective of whether they were in the office or traveling. We believe that access to consistent real-time data will improve our forecasting abilities as well as provide intelligence on how to redirect the business as needed based on recent events, customer relationships, product plans and market variations.”
True to this, the company is looking at extending the reporting functionality to its mobile workforce on their iPads. Given the scalability that the platform offers, the Group is also planning to extend its computation power to its content management systems such as MOSS DMS.
