Power Systems Client References
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The document discusses several case studies of organizations using IBM technologies to solve business problems and gain competitive advantages. Specifically, it describes how: 1) A Manhattan bank implemented an IBM Power and WebSphere solution with Actimize to enable real-time fraud prevention across all business units. 2) Elie Tahari used IBM Cognos BI to create a centralized data warehouse for better inventory management and sales forecasting. 3) Peking University Hospital implemented an electronic health record system on IBM technologies to improve healthcare services.
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Power Systems Client References
- 1. IBM Power Systems Client References IBM Power Systems February 2010
- 27. AIX References
Notas do Editor
- Client Name A Manhattan Bank Subtitle Preventing fraud and criminal attacks in real time around the globe The Need: A large international bank in Manhattan with a diverse business portfolio was vulnerable to fraud because its many legacy financial crime detection systems were expensive to run, lacked flexibility to respond to evolving threats and regulations and did not leverage cross-channel information. The Solution: The bank chose a solution from IBM and Actimize, a NICE Company, that will enable the bank to analyze data and prevent fraud in real-time, across various channels, such as the Internet, call center cards, payments and ATM systems – leveraging a single, scalable and robust IBM technology platform. The solution can anticipate attacks and learn from past fraudulent and criminal activity to protect the integrity of all systems. What Makes it Smarter: Using self-learning abilities and complex analytics capabilities, the solution can detect new and evolving criminal behavior and take preemptive action to prevent fraud and theft in all systems across all business units Giving administrators and other principals the insight they need by generating meaningful reports and helping the bank’s internal experts to develop new proprietary fraud models. Helping to manage fraud investigations across the enterprise. The solution support collaboration across the organization. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: Internal Ongoing project Industry : Banking /Financial
- APPROVAL: 9/9/09 Per client, this slide is approved for use in customer/prospective customer decks but may not be used in any press releases. Elie Tahari Ltd. New Intelligence BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Clothing retailer Elie Tahari has come to define modern sophistication with collections of understated grace and elegance. It is a privately held corporation with a global presence in more than 40 countries and with more than 600 stores in the United States. Elie Tahari had its order, sales, inventory and financial data spread across the company, making it difficult for managers to access the information needed to make critical business decisions quickly. Managers couldn't identify which products were in the greatest demand, resulting in the company overstocking its warehouses with less-popular items, while the hottest items remained on back order. SOLUTION: Elie Tahari needed to move from ad hoc query/OLAP to scorecards, dashboards, enhanced visualization, and predictive modeling to enable users to mine and access data on their own while maintaining standards, quality and consistency. To do so, the following solution components were implemented: IBM Cognos 8 IBM System i IBM Cognos Framework Manager To enable effective operations decisions, increased growth, constrained costs and improved profits, Elie Tahari needed to provide employees timely access to trusted information across the enterprise. Previously on a reporting platform known as "InSeam" and a Sky Web-based BI solution, Elie Tahari deployed a near real-time enterprise BI solution – “Tahari Real Time Environment for Data” (TREND) – as its framework for combining business objectives, organizational requirements and technology infrastructure. Elie Tahari created an Operational Data Store (ODS), a staging area for all the data from all its systems in one central place. The data warehouse is then loaded from that staging area. The BI tool reads the data from the data warehouse and presents it to the user in form of reports and or graphs. BENEFITS Improves visibility into business activity, enabling deeper insight into customer needs, targeting of new customers and better inventory forecasting Provides real-time access to business-critical information, driving faster responses to marketplace demands and business challenges Helps achieve a significant competitive advantage in the industry, boosted sales, and cut operational costs Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Retail
- Peking University People’s Hospital Providing better, smarter healthcare with electronic, remote monitoring The need: PKUPH has participated in a community healthcare management system launched by the Beijing Xicheng District Healthcare Bureau in 2008. While the program, powered by IBM’s HBI (Healthcare Business Integration) information platform, enables cooperation and resource sharing among medical service providers, its reach is restricted solely to the Xicheng District, or the western part of Beijing. As a leading university hospital with top-caliber medical expertise, PKUPH is ambitious to serve a wider population and broader area. To meet its expansion objectives, PKUPH will need to connect to more community hospitals and healthcare centers in other districts of Beijing and potentially other cities of China. To that end, PKUPH knew it had to build electronic records of patients and a medical record system that could be shared with other healthcare providers to facilitate the integration of medical resources and the process of patient referral. In addition, PKUPH plans to provide more responsive, proactive care to patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. While it is not easy to cure chronic diseases, the hospital hopes to improve the patients’ general well-being and reduce or prevent acute attacks. The solution: PKUPH is moving forward with a first of a kind (FOAK) project that aims to enhance the quality and efficiency of medical services. Supported by IBM Research, China, and leveraging the proven technology of IBM DB2, FileNet BPM, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Portal Server and EMPI, IBM Global Business Services is helping PKUPH implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for managing patients’ electronic health records. The platform and its integrated procedures will enable the interconnectivity and interoperability of patients’ health records among partnering healthcare providers throughout treatment cycles. All the medical files will follow local and international standards, such as HL7 RIM, CDA R2 and IHE XDS, to ensure seamless exchange of data in the future. The spirit of evidence-based patient-centered collaborative care is also being instilled into the management of chronic diseases. Clinical guidelines regarding use of medicine, potential risks and so on are encoded as part of the industry-standard process to enhance clinical decision support. In order to allow PKUPH to provide timely diagnosis and treatment to patients with chronic diseases, the CRL is implementing IBM’s advanced clinical process management technology, building into the platform telemedicine functionality that leverages mobile telecommunications and real-time messaging alert services. In the future, vital signs of patients such as blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar level will be constantly monitored by mobile devices at their homes and fed into the system immediately. Any occurrence of irregularity will automatically trigger an instant alert notification to PKUPH for prompt response. What makes it smarter: - Currently, patients’ medical records are scattered across various hospitals, community clinics and township healthcare centers, and even in different systems within one organization. The solution’s functionality will create longitudinal electronic health records of patients, allowing personalized health assessment and treatment for patients based on their individual medical circumstances. Starting from early 2011, the new service will be rolled out at selected hospitals and community clinics. - PKUPH will target diabetic patients as the first batch of participants in the chronic disease management program. The system is a viable preventive measure in stemming acute attacks as it will monitor whether a patient is following his treatment plan or returning for outpatient visits regularly. It is also very responsive. Patients’ blood sugar, blood pressure and heart rate data will be stored and analyzed. When changes in these vital signs happen for a sustained, pre-determined period of time, the system will automatically generate an alert to the patient and his medical specialists to enable immediate actions. With continued monitoring and real-time alert capability, the solution will help mitigate the development of the patients’ conditions, reduce acute attacks, and improve their quality of life. Instrumented: To enable exchange of medical data, the health record platform is equipped with file adaptors, such as CDA (Clinical Data Architecture) adaptor, which can convert disorganized files into standardized, interoperable formats. In addition, a mobile widget will be made available to patients with chronic medical conditions. When a diabetic patient, for example, uses blood pressure and blood sugar test kits at home, the data will be sent out from the widget and fed into PKUPH’s centralized platform. Interconnected: Through the project, PKUPH aims to consolidate 7-8 internal systems as well as connect more closely with other medical service providers. The system will enable all the participating institutions to share and exchange medical data smoothly. Intelligent: By embedding evidence-based medicine capability into the chronic disease control mechanism, the solution will benefit doctors and patients. Diagnosis and treatment will become more efficient, and mistakes will be minimized, assisted by automatically-generated suggestions and warnings on medical procedures and prescriptions based on patients’ health records and symptoms. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Healthcare
- Client Name: Rotkäppchen-Mumm Sektkellereien Subtitle: Enhances business analytics and forecasting German winemaker Rotkäppchen-Mumm Sektkellereien, whose name refers to the little red riding cap logo on the company’s main sparkling wine brand, was founded in 1856 in Freyburg, Germany. Today, the company’s 528 employees produce wine, spirits and a variety of other drinks under brands such as Geldermann, Rotkäppchen, Mumm, Jules Mumm, MM Extra, Kloss and Foerster, Chantré, Mariacron, Echter Nordhäuser and Eckes Edelkirsch. In 2009, the company reached record earnings of €778 million, up from €740 million the preceding year. Rotkäppchen is the market leader in sparkling wine in Germany, controlling more than 43 percent of the market. The Need: The company acquired Eckes Spirituosen & Wein in December 2006. Initially, the two operations ran side by side, but the parent company wanted to fully integrate the data, systems and processes of Eckes into the Rotkäppchen SAP ERP infrastructure to reduce costs and increase efficiency across the business. To support the increased number of users and the larger volume of data in the SAP environment, Rotkäppchen needed to refresh its hardware infrastructure. At the same time, the company wanted to enhance business intelligence to improve the accuracy of forecasting and production planning. The Solution: Working with IBM Global Technology Services, the company upgraded its IBM i environment, running production instances of SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on an IBM Power Systems i550. The company uses an IBM Power 520 Express solution to run its SAP test, development and quality assurance instances as well as its SAP Solution Manager. An IBM System Storage TS3100 tape library is used for backups. To improve business intelligence, the company selected IBM Cognos software. Accessed via desktop client applications running in a Microsoft Windows environment, the Cognos software facilitates sales volume planning, rolling three-month volume forecasting and annual customer profitability planning. Account managers can enter sales estimates into the Cognos tools, making adjustments on a month-to-month basis. This rolling forecast feeds into the production planning solutions. As a result, managers can balance the company’s stock positions, actual and predicted sales, and marketing promotions to optimize efficiency. Business results are fed continuously back into the sales forecasting tool for the next monthly rolling forecast. What Makes it Smarter: Intelligent: Business results are continuously fed back into the sales forecasting tool for the next monthly rolling forecast, generating a positive feedback cycle to optimize business performance. Instrumented: Sales estimates are captured into IBM Cognos tools from point-of-sale devices, barcode scanners and market research from external vendors, such as A.C. Nielsen. Interconnected: The solution extracts data to create forecasts, distributes data to production sites and makes data available to business intelligence and data warehousing applications. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project : External Win/Ongoing project/Completed project Industry : Food and beverage
- Media & Newspaper Group Media assets organized and managed for competitive advantage The need: The environment surrounding the newspaper business has become increasingly harsh and the long-established newspaper social role of delivering news reports and publicly recording history is being taken over by digital media like the Internet. Young people being less and less interested in newspapers is undeniably a trend of times, so all newspaper publishers have no choice but to deal with these changes. This Newspaper & Media Group (NMG) decided on the construction of a new business infrastructure that would allow innovation and retain its position of leadership in the media business. The aim of the new system is as follows: enhanced flexibility of organizations and functions towards development of new services, construction of a new platform to integrate paper and electronic media, cost reduction in traditional business operations and investment in a new business model The solution: In the new production system, NMG performs end-to-end production processes: editing, production, printing, etc. on one common infrastructure. These were previously done in totally separate environments - each newspaper and media had its own organization, resources, management processes, IT systems, and production processes. The new system is equipped with streamlined system workflow that navigates and assists those who work on any part of the entire publishing process. One of the core functions in the new system is management of raw materials for content production directed by its 1,700-1,800 editors. By systematically managing the sheer volume of text articles and images (art, photos, and motion pictures) that individual editors collect, the system allows those involved in production processes to efficiently perform work for a variety of media. Each raw material item is automatically tagged with a theme and other relevant categories so that a person working on editorial can swiftly find what he/she needs. Also, the system is equipped with a robust search capability to select suitable material from the large volume available. The system includes an auto-recommendation and distribution of materials to editors based on pre-registered preferences according to the scope of their individual responsibilities. The new system brings NMG the following new capabilities: - Complete visibility over what, where, and who is working on specific content production across the company's various publications and media - Management tools to maximize the value from information assets (“assets” being materials for content production) - Streamlined production through processes that are now workflow-based. - Shorter time to launch new media in that every step in the production process is accelerated: conceptualization, theme development, search for materials, editing, and approval of final copy for publishing. Consisting of IBM Power Systems (p570/p550) servers and integrated DB using IBM DB2, the new system supports the end-to-end production processes from interviews to content development by managing a variety of constituents company-wide in a streamlined manner. With the development of a system that allows integration with digital media as well as publishing systems, editors can optimize, exchange, and upload/download materials efficiently. With different newspapers and medias sharing those materials, the company as a whole can leverage assets as much as possible. In addition, user interfaces are also improved with ThinkCentre M57p that have enhanced editing and motion picture processing capabilities. Dynamic LPAR technology is applied to the main servers, enabling a virtualized environment that allows efficient use of resources. Highly scalable IBM BladeCenter HS21 and IBM System x are implemented as input/output servers. The application execution environment is constructed with IBM WebSphere Application Server. System monitoring and backup are managed using IBM Tivoli products. The new system is located in a data center in Tokyo with a mirror environment in Osaka. The system was designed, built and implemented with the assistance of IBM Global Business Services - Application Services. IBM application specialists provided system and application architecture design services, and development, testing, data conversion and implementation support along with an end-to-end project management and business process re-engineering associated with the solution. Constructing interfaces to a range of specialized IT systems, such as those for newspaper publication, was also part of the scope of work. Benefits: With all raw materials for contents production across different media – whether initially for newspapers, magazines, or online news – in a single integrated database equipped with advanced search capability and intelligent recommendation/distribution function to its 1,700-1,800 editors, NMG now gains full visibility of what exact information assets the company has to create news, articles, and correspondences on its various media. In the news media business where fresh information is rigorously required 24 x 7, a great deal of raw materials simply end their lifecycle without being used once. Given the sheer volume of these materials – they amount up to 1 million items in just a 3-month time frame - the ability to quickly find the right information while it’s fresh and use it to develop a suitable content is a direct competitive advantage to the company. Information as to what kind of materials are obtained where and when, and are being used in what media is centrally managed. This generates new insights for NMG as a whole as to how best to use assets in hand to develop high-quality and high-impact media contents, as well as to create synergy effects amongst the different media assets that the company has. Also, with the new centralized content material management system, NMG management can easily grasp where and what contents are being worked on at a given point of time, and then take necessary actions to maximize value of media contents for consumers: e.g. reallocate critical resources to create a synergy effect by aligning multiple media’s production processes for enhanced messaging, and/or quickly launching new media leveraging any existing information assets. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External/ Blinded Completed project Industry : Media & Entertainment
- Chinese Provincial Health Bureau Smarter information management improves public healthcare services The need: In April 2009, the Chinese government unveiled a blueprint for healthcare reform that aims to provide affordable healthcare services for all 1.3 billion citizens. The State Council also announced an investment of 850 billion yuan (124 billion U.S. dollars) for the three-year healthcare reform plan. To help realize the government's vision, this provincial health bureau needed to establish a system that could better manage its healthcare services. The system needed to be an open platform that would serve as a foundation and an integrator of the Province’s existing resources in public facilities, insurance programs, medical supplies, public health clinics and many administrative units. The solution: IBM helped the Health Bureau to establish an Integrated Healthcare Platform. With IBM Global Business Services China leading the solution design and application development, IBM kicked off the project in 2008. Running WebSphere Application Server on IBM System p and DB2 on Power 595, the platform provides a highly scalable, flexible environment for building and deploying high-performance applications. Leveraging WebSphere middleware products, the system controls data exchange between the application servers and database. Power 595 utilizes logical partitioning technology and enables the platform to dynamically allocate resources based on workloads. The platform enables integration and standardization of information originally siloed in various application systems of the health bureau. Now data is consolidated via the platform - for example, hospitals are able to report certain communicable disease information (including symptoms and test results) to the Bureau through the platform, which will compile the information and trigger alerts when any disease is close to epidemic proportions. Also, the platform will serve as a database of medical experts and rescue & relief resources. What makes it smarter: Instrumented : The IBM solution is an underlying platform that integrates all the existing and future applications of various departments of the Health Bureau. Raw data is collected from the business applications and utilized effectively. Interconnected : Data from different systems is now integrated through the SOA-based system. Through the project, the haphazard information has been sorted into well organized categories. Through this platform, the leader of the health bureau can access all the data, information and status through a single interface at office so that to make effective decision. Intelligent: The solution provides the Health Bureau a good starting point to strengthen its ability to monitor and analyze disease and medicine use trends, laying the foundation for smarter healthcare and public health services. For example, the Bureau will be able to detect the presence of a potential epidemic and nip it in the bud in the early development stage. The platform also makes it possible for the client to decipher the trends of prescription drug use, understand the general condition of citizens and take preemptive measures to improve their wellness. Public Health Services: - The system will enable improved immunization planning, disease control and prevention, community healthcare services, infectious disease surveillance, etc. For example, the system can automatically alert the Bureau when an infectious disease appears, to enable the Bureau to put measures in place to help prevent epidemics. - The platform also makes it possible for the Bureau to decipher the trends of prescription drug use, understand the general condition of citizens and take preemptive measures to improve their wellness. - The platform will serve as a database of medical experts and rescue and relief resources. When any emergency, for instance, a natural disaster, epidemic or even a severe car crash strikes within the province, the platform, embedded with a geographical information system (GIS), will be able to identify medical experts near the affected area and effectively manage relief and aid logistics. Citizen-health: It is expected that in the near future, all citizens will be able to establish their own e-healthcare records and enjoy cheaper and more accessible public healthcare services. In the long run, every person in the province will have a medical record that aggregates all her health history spanning across the entire life cycle. Since medical records are consolidated, healthcare service providers are connected, and public health information is shared via the platform, the Bureau will be able to enhance the execution of the government’s policies by making medical resources more evenly distributed and more effectively utilized. The integration of EMRs will also help facilitate patient referrals and enable test result exchanges. In the future, hospitals will handle severe medical conditions, and community clinics or health centers will handle minor ones. Patients will not have to travel long distance to hospitals for treatment, and can return to clinics nearest to their homes for rehabilitation or outpatient care after the procedures. Combined with telemedicine services, provided through mobile medical vans to rural citizens, this will help patients save time and money significantly. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External/blinded Ongoing project Industry : Healthcare
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype= CR&subtype = NA&htmlfid =0GLOS-82GRBV&appname= crmd Client Name SuperPharm Subtitle Tracks and analyzes sales of 15,000 stocked items and up to 10,000 transactions daily The Need: To build the first retail superstores in Trinidad – traditionally a “Mom and Pop” retail environment -- SuperPharm sought an all-encompassing centralized management system with a robust architecture that required minimal maintenance and facilitated fast growth. The Solution: All stores are linked to a central server, providing instant access to real-time data on sales, purchases and inventory. The solution uses S2K Enterprise Retail from VAI -- enterprise resource planning (ERP) and POS software built on an IBM WebSphere® Studio Workbench platform. S2K uses DB2® for data access, management and integration, and the IBM server scales easily with the needs of six stores now, with plans to expand to 20 in Trinidad and Tobago. The system compiles and analyzes sales by a variety of criteria, including store, salesperson, product line and stock-keeping unit (SKU) at both the summary and detail level. It automatically keeps track of purchases, product movement and inventory levels, recognizes and analyzes sales trends and triggers alerts with suggestions for immediate action, such as stock replenishments through either purchasing or rebalancing. What Makes it Smarter: The system automatically tracks stock fluctuations and performs sales analysis, demand planning and forecasting for 15,000 stock items and 10,000 transactions daily. Analysis results trigger alerts with suggestions for immediate action and future consideration. Reports on sales trends by item and location help management and purchasing agents make informed decisions to identify profitable and unprofitable products and determine appropriate stock levels. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Retail
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7MQKBT&appname=crmd Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) Better predicts climate change by streaming real-world environmental data BUSINESS CHALLENGE Funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and Education, Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) is a respected research institution that specializes in the study of climatology and mid- to long-term climate changes. The center supplements its internal research efforts by extending computing facilities for numerical simulations of climate modeling to outside organizations. And CMCC has established a number of research networks to promote collaboration among universities, other research centers and businesses. In 2007, CMCC built a state-of-the-art research center in Lecce, Italy, that was intended to become the focal point for collaboration efforts for researchers across Europe. The site would offer substantial computing power to users in order to support the high processing demands of advanced climate modeling efforts. And, to support this goal, CMCC needed to deploy an infrastructure capable of handling the large data volumes and intense operational demands of modern simulation systems. SOLUTION Joining with IBM Business Partner Computer Var, CMCC deployed a high-performance climate modeling system that enables the organization to create more-accurate climate models in support of its research efforts. Monitoring stations across Italy provide the center with a steady stream of meteorological records, ranging from storm-tracking data to current temperatures and geographical mappings of natural disasters. Research center staff can then leverage the new solution to create complex climate and weather models that represent existing conditions. Furthermore, by analyzing the compiled data, researchers can produce complex simulations that help predict future change. And, to support its goals of extended collaboration, CMCC enables outside research agencies to access its new modeling solution. The new climatology and meteorology modeling infrastructure resides on a clustered computing infrastructure built with a trio of IBM Power™ 570 servers along with 30 IBM Power 575 servers, all running the IBM AIX ® operating system. To complement this server hardware, CMCC also deployed a pair of IBM System Storage™ DCS 9900 disk systems that are directly attached to the server cluster. The storage system leverages the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) function to support high-speed file access for the stored climate data. To help protect the large volumes of data gathered by the climate monitoring stations and stored on the IBM storage hardware, CMCC also leverages IBM Tivoli ® Storage Manager V5.5 software to periodically archive historical data to an IBM TotalStorage ® 3584 Ultrium UltraScalable Tape Library. All data migration, archiving and restoration processes are automated by the Tivoli solution, eliminating the need for manual human intervention. BENEFITS Helps create more-realistic climate models by leveraging streaming meteorological data from monitoring stations across Italy Establishes a powerful, highly available computing environment able to support more-complex simulations and analysis procedures, helping to increase the accuracy of research efforts Fosters collaboration among researchers across Europe with a centralized computing infrastructure that can be accessed from outside the center Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Education
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7QM4W2&appname=crmd China New Media Development Zone Improves facility management with a wireless tracking solution BUSINESS CHALLENGE Xingguang Park (XGP) is a major television park located in Beijing, China. Every day numerous people, including movie stars, personnel and tourists, enter the park. XGP asked China New Media Development Zone (CNM) to help it build a wireless sensor network (WSN) that would enable the park to better track and manage the large number of entrants. It needed a solution that would guide and serve visitors according to their registration level, enable the park to monitor asset location in realtime, and connect to the park’s critical business applications. SOLUTION CNM selected IBM Global Technology Services and IBM Business Partner LOIT to help XGP increase the efficiency of park management. The new solution consists of a sensor layer made up of the WSN and active radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that will be issued to each visitor and vehicle that enters XGP, enabling individuals and equipment to be identified and located in realtime. The monitoring layer includes mobile realtime digital cameras that monitor people and assets under predefined policies and wireless bulletin boards that display guidance to visitors, or alerts in case of an emergency. The workflow layer connects the sensors and monitoring systems to applications such as asset awareness and reuse, individual guidance, tourist group guidance, equipment check-in, boundary management and emergency command systems. CNM and IBM Global Technology Services implemented two IBM System p5® 550 Express servers running the IBM AIX 5L™ operating system to support the databases connected to the client’s Oracle and EMC Documentum park management and content management systems. Four IBM System x® 3650 servers running Red Hat Linux® and Microsoft® Windows® operating systems support the WSN management server and RFID controller. Eleven IBM BladeCenter® HS12 servers running Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms support a variety of applications including the park’s geographic information system (GIS), facility management system, park management workflow system and system management server. BENEFITS Increases ability to monitor and manage personnel and visitors more efficiently with fewer resources Provides a connection to asset awareness applications, guidance systems and emergency command systems Improves ability to handle and ensure the safety of large crowds Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Government
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7QNPGL&appname=crmd Con Edison Driving demand reduction by promoting energy-efficient IT BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Consolidated Edison Company of New York (Con Edison), a regulated utility, provides electric service in New York City and most of Westchester County. Facing greater operational challenges in building out its infrastructure, a state-mandated 15 percent reduction in energy consumption by 2015 and a recognition of the need to reduce emissions, Con Edison needed to develop a demand-side management (DSM) program. For DSM to work, customers need a granular, timely way to measure consumption. However, only one in four IT managers has visibility into their data center’s energy consumption. Con Edison needed a way to provide customers with both visibility into consumption and expertise in designing data centers for maximum efficiency. SOLUTION: Con Edison and IBM formed a first-of-a-kind energy efficiency partnership that combines the complementary skill sets of an IT provider and energy services company, and delivers it to customers in a seamless, team-based manner. Sustained efficiency improvements are certified by an independent third party, Neuwing Energy Ventures, a leading verifier of energy efficiency projects and marketer of Energy Efficiency Certificates (EECs). Neuwing Energy conducts a thorough energy audit of the customer’s data center, establishing a baseline. IBM works with the customer to optimize the design of the data center, leveraging its expertise in data center energy efficiency and virtualization, as well as its industry-leading line of energy-efficient servers and storage devices and a range of advanced energy management products such as IBM Active Energy Manager software. Neuwing Energy conducts a follow-up energy audit and customers are then issued one EEC for each megawatt hour per year in reduced energy consumption. EECs can be traded for cash on the growing energy efficiency certificate market, or otherwise retained to demonstrate reductions in energy use and associated CO 2 emissions. Through server virtualization, the customers that have taken part in the program thus far have been able to increase utilization levels of their servers and storage devices, while freeing up valuable floor space in their data centers. BENEFITS Average of 42 percent reduction in annual data center energy consumption and associated costs Increase in environmental responsibility and sustainability Increased system utilization through data center virtualization and consolidation Ability to earn energy efficiency certificates to apply for demand reduction incentives or document progress toward sustainability targets More flexibility to pursue computing intensive business initiatives Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing Industry : Case study link Energy & Utilities Reference link
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7LZQFU&appname=crmd Fiserv More efficient data storage and management provide strategic assets for business growth BUSINESS CHALLENGE CheckFree Corporation, a subsidiary of Fiserv, supports electronic billing and payment (EPB) for thousands of financial institutions. The rapid adoption of EPB services led to the company’s processing more than one billion transactions a year. CheckFree wanted to continue meeting its service level agreements (SLAs) while keeping operational costs in check. It also wanted to leverage data and resources as strategic assets to foster business growth. SOLUTION CheckFree leveraged IBM expertise to implement a comprehensive bill-payments data warehouse to optimize performance and productivity. Different sources across the company gather data—including consumer usage information, case and claim data, electronic billing information, and employee data—which is then processed by extract, transform and load (ETL) technology, and finally loaded into an IBM DB2® 9 data server. The information management software provides a comprehensive, single view of the company’s and its clients’ bill-payments data. The DB2 bill-payments data warehouse features 25TB of storage capacity and advanced data partitioning, which enables CheckFree to rigorously test new clients’ electronic billing and payment systems without a dedicated test environment. The DB2 information management system also has a data compression feature that accommodates rapidly growing information and maintains high performance levels, thereby reducing the need for additional storage solutions. Given the sensitive nature of stored information, CheckFree also installed IBM DB2 Query Patroller software to monitor who is accessing what data. It enables the company’s associates to determine what processes to execute and when to balance utilization and optimize throughput. Further, DB2 Query Patroller software integrates with IBM DB2 Design Advisor software to make recommendations on enterprise performance and tuning. The DB2 bill-payments data warehouse runs on IBM System p5® 575 servers, each featuring eight CPUs and 64GB of RAM. One dedicated System p5 575 server handles ETL processing. Another System p5 575 platform is a dedicated hot-standby server featuring IBM High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP®) software, which enables the system to act as a failover server. As a result, the company can meet its clients’ 24x7-availability SLAs for electronic bill payments and data warehouse environments. BENEFITS Improves data availability and performance while reducing the cost of ownership Helps CheckFree’s clients understand consumer bill-payment habits and identify new marketplace opportunities Defers significant expenses and improves database performance while maintaining SLAs by repositioning and reusing storage Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Financial markets
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7TSSJP&appname=crmd IBM Microelectronics Automates and optimizes production schedules with increased process visibility The Need: IBM is a global computer products, services and solutions company that is based in Armonk, New York. Its IBM Microelectronics organization is charged with the development, manufacture and marketing of semiconductors, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and similar technologies. One of the organization’s key production sites—a 300-millimeter semiconductor manufacturing facility—is located in East Fishkill, New York. The 14,000-square-meter facility boasts some of IBM’s most advanced 90-nanometer processes. The East Fishkill wafer fabrication site needs to cater to a number of demands, balancing the requirements of general manufacturing, research and specialized client support teams. And supporting so many production priorities was resulting in too much waste at the location. In particular, the facility could not efficiently coordinate its manufacturing processes, increasing the consumption of production and treatment materials. For example, chemical baths that were used to clean and treat semiconductors were being purged more frequently than needed as different products required different treatments. However, by better coordinating production schedules, the same bath solutions could be reused several more times. Similarly, time-sensitive production efforts would sometimes be delayed by poor production planning, resulting in the need to rework (or scrap) the produced semiconductors. IBM Microelectronics wished to implement an optimization and business-rules-based framework at its East Fishkill site that would help better coordinate these efforts. The Solution: Leveraging IBM software, the facility put in place an integrated manufacturing execution system that supports near-real-time dispatching and production management. Every five minutes, the system assesses the state of manufacturing processes, noting available materials, lot priorities, process constraints and overall throughput. Based on this information, the solution then publishes an optimal schedule for the manufacturing systems and plant assets including furnaces, wet tools and lithography tools. And this optimized schedule works to better reuse chemical treatments and avoid interruptions to time-sensitive production efforts. Facility staff can view this production schedule in real time via a Web-based interface and make corrections or scheduling adjustments to accommodate additional factors. And to encourage ongoing process improvements, schedules are routinely archived. Users can then analyze manufacturing efforts over an extended period to track scheduling behavior and identify recurring patterns. These findings can subsequently be used to establish new business rules and policies that better optimize the automated production efforts. IBM WebSphere ® ILOG JRules V5.1 software serves as the heart of this solution, providing a centralized business rule management system. And IBM ILOG CPLEX V10 software leverages these business rules to optimize the dispatch and production schedules, which are stored in an IBM DB2 ® V8 data server. To encourage increased visibility into these manufacturing processes and support user control, the facility also employs the IBM ILOG JViews application to build customized, Web-based graphical displays for the dispatch system. Similarly, IBM SiView software helps integrate the management control tools with the facility’s existing manufacturing systems. The entire solution is hosted on IBM System p5 ® 595 servers, and the facility maintains a similarly-configured test environment on additional IBM System p ® hardware. What Makes It Smarter: Automates and optimizes production and dispatching schedules by leveraging near-real-time materials and business data Offers increased visibility into manufacturing processes, allowing IBM to reduce waste and improve overall product quality Increases production throughput and reduces the cycle time of manufacturing efforts by optimizing resource and tool utilization Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Computer services
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-795D8N&appname=crmd Institut Català de la Salut (ICS) Taking a holistic approach to healthcare management with IBM and SAP The Need: Institut Català de la Salut (ICS) runs eight hospitals and 470 primary care units located in Catalunya, Spain. ICS is the largest healthcare provider in Catalonia. Coordinating both medical and support activities was a complex challenge. For example, with separate purchasing departments in its different operational units, ICS was not able to exploit vendor economies of scale. At the medical level, the different systems and procedures within the various hospitals made it very difficult to compare and improve efficiency, as the data was effectively isolated in each unit’s systems. At each hospital ICS was running in-house developed software, not truly capable of meeting the needs of the group. It lacked scalability, and had not originally been designed for collecting and integrating data from multiple sites. The group considered writing its own software, buying an integration solution, or reconsidering its strategy completely. Technically and financially, it became clear that ICS could solve the issues by working with IBM Global Business Services. The Solution: Working with IBM, ICS took an early decision to move to SAP software to manage the business, selecting the SAP for Healthcare solution. IBM Global Business Services was selected to analyze and design a new corporate model, including the implementation of a single information system based on SAP applications. The service included the detailed system design, building, testing and implementation. With advice from the IBM Global Business Services team, ICS implemented a suite of SAP ERP applications. The combination of SAP ERP for general business management and the industry-based offerings provides a comprehensive range of integrated systems for ICS, where it is possible to control every operational process from within a single environment. IBM Global Business Services was able to assist ICS with the design, building, implementation and test of new business processes and new ways of working, supported by its ability to deliver on a complex program with thousands of users who need constant 24-hour access. IBM Global Business Services has also helped conduct thousands of hours of training at the hospitals, a particularly valuable exercise. IBM Global Technology Services delivered the infrastructure implementation from end to end, and now manages both the hardware and the user help desk as an out-tasked service. The machines themselves are co-located at a data center run by a third-party service provider. With the help of IBM Global Technology services, ICS implemented IBM Power 505 servers and an IBM BladeCenter with JS12 Express blade servers to run the main SAP applications under IBM AIX, while the Oracle database runs in AIX partitions on two IBM Power 590 servers. The IBM team also implemented Tivoli Storage Management (TSM) to manage back-ups. The platform has recently been upgraded with a pSeries with AIX platform, totaling €1.5 M. IBM Global Business Services – Application Management Services was subsequently selected to provide the ongoing maintenance and development. The team is working to sell iLOG and COGNOS to the customer. What Makes it Smarter With the SAP applications in place, ICS now has a central view of hospital operations. In turn, by aligning purchasing more closely with each hospital’s needs, ICS has been able to reduce its total inventory of medical supplies, freeing up capital and reducing physical storage requirements. The savings on purchasing costs alone have produced an immediate 100 percent return on investment. The centralized procurement has helped IC gain a much clearer picture of what it requires, and enabled it to put in place new plans for contracts for the next three or four years. All patient information – whatever hospital initially collects it – is managed centrally by the SAP for Healthcare solution. As a result, doctors at any hospital can access complete, consolidated patient charts and records, enabling them to diagnose and prescribe more easily. Patient safety is improved with end-to-end process management technology that provides the proper access, continuity, and coordination of care – and mitigates human error by utilizing specific medical logic and enforcing safety protocols. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Healthcare
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-78WVZX&appname=crmd Japan Airlines Raising the bar in the airline industry BACKGROUND An industry that depends on IT Information technology is, in a way, as important to Japan Airlines as the safe and timely transportation of its passengers. Every aspect of the airline's business operations, from reservations to ticketing to scheduling to maintenance to business operations and more, relies on its IT systems to support its business. JAL's IT systems are -- in every sense of the phrase -- mission-critical. Increasing passenger volume, along with heavier use of the Internet, is putting greater demands on these systems than ever before: Today, half of JAL's tickets are sold via the Web, and its reservation and ticketing systems are entirely electronic. In the airline industry, the cost of an IT outage can be millions of dollars per hour, according to JAL. There is not only the direct cost of lost sales while the systems are down, but the highly interdependent nature of the business means that an IT outage has a ripple effect that is felt throughout the enterprise. The resulting delays cause not only inconvenience for passengers and other customers, but higher costs for the airline as well. Beyond the direct financial impact, the potential for damage to the airline's reputation is just as great. An outage of as little as 15 minutes will be picked up by the media and reported. A loss of prestige like this can hurt revenues long after the actual problem is CHALLENGE To solidify its market leadership in the face of increasing passenger traffic and competition, Japan Airlines (JAL) needed a way to reduce the potential for costly service interruptions caused by IT system outages. SOLUTION Japan Airlines, working with IBM, implemented an enterprise-wide IT issue tracking, change and configuration management solution -- an industry first in Japan -- that gives JAL management greater visibility into, and control over, the company's mission-critical IT operations and a better understanding of how they impact the business as a whole Being proactive Japan Airlines management saw an opportunity, provided by evolving technology, to improve its operations, cut risk and raise the standard of service quality for the entire industry. JAL took a leadership position, pioneering aggressive efforts to improve the availability of its IT systems. JAL had long been working to maintain the highest possible standards of IT reliability, but these efforts faced a fundamental challenge. JAL had limited visibility into the state of its IT systems at any given time, in terms of configuration, operational status, asset location or the potential impact of changes. Obtaining this information would enhance the company's existing quality initiatives, giving JAL the ability to not only respond more quickly to IT system problems, but provide a basis for continuous improvement so that future problems could be avoided entirely. This improvement in capability had the potential to affect the entire business, enabling JAL to achieve unprecedented levels of service and thus solidifying JAL's market-leading position as a premier air carrier. With some 1,500 servers supporting multiple business units, the scale of the project was considerable. The project, undertaken by IBM Global Technology Services, addressed the challenge of crossing boundaries within the enterprise. Each division within JAL had its own processes and procedures for change and systems management, and information was not shared between divisions. In some cases, procedures were inefficient. For example, recovering from an outage might require the presence of a key systems administrator. Since most system changes are conducted in the middle of the night when the load is the lightest, that's when outages are most likely to occur. Understandably, it was often difficult to reach an administrator promptly to authorize corrective action. JAL Information Technology Co., Ltd. (an IT joint venture company founded by JAL and IBM/JAL's IT arm) and IBM Global Technology Services implemented new procedures and policies based on the industry-standard Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This supplier-independent, open framework of best practice approaches facilitates the delivery of high-quality IT services, including an extensive set of management procedures and process design guidance The solution monitors system status continuously. Mobile phone electronic message alerts are sent, when needed, to some 200 critical employees (including the CIO) to update the latest IT outage situation so that appropriate action can be taken promptly. Incidents are ranked by severity, from Level 1 to Level 4, with Level 1 incidents being those that can have the most severe impact on flight operations. To speed recovery and increase system resiliency, the team defined new policies that govern how each kind of incident is to be dealt with. For example, before the most severe incidents can be closed, specific remediation steps must be defined and acted upon. In this way, the same problem is much less likely to recur. New information focuses the business on the importance of IT The new information provided by the solution helps not only the IT side of the company, but the business side as well. Thanks to an unprecedented level of knowledge about system status, company management has gained a better appreciation of the mission-critical nature of JAL's computing systems. At the first board meeting after the system was installed, JAL's CIO was able to show that some 1,000 system changes were being made every month -- 12,000 per year, each one carrying with it the potential for IT service interruption. "Thanks to this new information, never before available," says an IT Service and Planning executive, "we were able to dramatically demonstrate the importance of improved monitoring and management of the airline's IT systems to the business side of the enterprise. This, combined with our demonstrated results, has helped management to place the appropriate focus and priority on our efforts to improve system availability.“ JAL has realized impressive gains in system reliability, resilience and availability. In the first year of operation, Level 1 incidents fell by 58 percent, and Level 2 incidents fell by 39 percent. The time needed for recovery has also been drastically reduced, with systems being brought back online 80 percent faster. Now that JAL has met its initial objectives, it is setting higher standards. What JAL's leadership means While JAL's airline industry-first initiatives in boosting IT availability have helped it to maintain its competitive advantage among its peers, these efforts have broader implications. Other airlines have been influenced by JAL's improved performance to make changes of their own. "Taken together, these actions ultimately benefit not only the airlines individually, but also the industry as a whole and the traveling public as well, through improved on-time performance and an air transport system that runs more smoothly," concludes the executive. Establishing transparency and best practices-based management of its IT systems is a critical first step to further improvements to come. JAL is investigating server consolidation and a service-oriented architecture approach to its IT systems, two initiatives that promise to reduce the number of potential points of failure while increasing cost-effectiveness and system performance. BENEFITS Reduces the number of system failures and interruptions, and overall downtime, dramatically: In the first year, system failures were down 58 percent, IT service interruptions were down 39 percent and downtime was reduced by 80 percent; in addition, the rate of outages continues to improve Improves overall quality of service by reducing IT outage-related operational delays Gives JAL management unprecedented visibility into the current state of its IT systems, fostering a greater understanding of how IT affects the business Provides issue tracking, configuration and change management that reduces the overall risk of IT outages and the resulting negative impact on airline flight operations Helps to achieve better business resiliency through more efficient, streamlined business processes that help to recover from outages more quickly and prevent IT issues from recurring New policies and procedures leverage industry best practices for IT management
- pre-approved http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7YMPNX&appname=crmd LAENDmarKS Smarter Supply Chain: Gaining precision through end-to-end parts traceability The Need: Every year, in a pattern remarkable for its consistency, automobile manufacturers recall millions of their vehicles to address problems or defects. For automobile manufacturers forced to issue a recall, the costs can be staggering—not only in direct costs such as consumer notification, replacement parts and labor, but also in the potential damage to the manufacturer’s brand, which can impact brand loyalty and future market share. What’s equally remarkable is that the high cost of recalls can, in many cases, be traced to parts whose underlying costs is a tiny fraction of the cost of repairing them. With no means to trace defective parts to the subset of vehicles affected by them, auto manufacturers have—as a matter of safety—followed a sweeping approach in which vehicles of entire model years are recalled. In many ways, the need to follow a policy in which “some bad apples” are assumed to “spoil the bunch” may be the single most important reason that recalls are so costly and inefficient. Prompted by a German government program aimed at strengthening the country’s automobile industry, KEIPER, a large supplier, proposed extending its internal traceability system into a standardized, global platform that could be used across the full extent of the value chain. To meet this goal, KEIPER pulled together a consortium of German automakers, suppliers, software companies and academia and spearheaded their collective efforts in a project known as LAENDmarKS. The Solution: Brought into the project by consortium member IBS AG, IBM saw LAENDmarKS as a different kind of supply chain traceability solution requiring a fundamentally different architectural approach. Up until then, data related to supply-chain “events” (such as a parts shipment arriving at a receiving gate) was consumed directly by the local traceability solution of IBS AG. IBM’s breakthrough was to apply an SOA-based approach under which supply chain data was abstracted into a separate event repository—independent of applications—that could be tapped for multiple purposes. To address the thorny issue of data security, IBM Global Business Services designed a global traceability solution that enables each company in the connected supply chain to maintain its own events repository, updated by the IBS AG event capturing solution within each company, from which it can provide partners with appropriate levels of access. The LAENDmarKS project was successful because it demonstrated that with the right technological foundation, the automotive supply chain could be made more transparent along its entire span—not just within or between the largest players. For the purposes of tracking defective parts, the most obvious benefit is the continuity of information the solution enables, which gives supply chain planners the means to trace quality problems to their source. Equally important is solution’s ability to track parts in the context of the modules, assemblies—and ultimately finished vehicles—that they go into. With this combination of traceability attributes, auto manufacturers and their partners can isolate the extent of problems with a high degree of precision, without taking any chances on the safety of their customers. What Makes it Smarter: - Expected major reduction in costs associated with vehicle recalls through more precise tracking of parts across the automobile value chain - Improved quality control for automobile manufacturers and suppliers - Avoidance of damage to brand and customer loyalty resulting from large-scale vehicle recalls - Improved decision-making in the area of production, inventory and logistics due to increased supply chain transparency - Improved parts traceability enables automobile manufacturers and suppliers to target their recalls to specific vehicles affected by defects. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Automotive
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7QURS5&appname=crmd Norkis Group Improves customer services with mobile devices that capture and send customer data The Need: Norkis Group is the manufacturer and distributor of Yamaha motorcycles and the Norkis Legacy compact pickup truck in the Philippines. The company is a leading conglomerate in the nation with more than 300 branches. With so many branches, the business needed to capitalize on economies of scale and share business processes across the organization more efficiently. To do this, it needed to first centralize its disparate environment and standardize its processes, especially for its financial organization and its sales outlets. The ultimate goal was to be able to ensure the company’s future growth through a robust IT infrastructure. SOLUTION IBM deployed applications from alliance partner SAP in the new data center it built for Norkis. The SAP ERP and SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications act as the company’s core business management system. The business applications include controlling, customer service, financial accounting, financial supply chain management, materials management, and sales and distribution functionality. The integration of the environment was made possible by creating an IBM DB2 ® database—chosen for its integration capabilities with SAP—with a common set of conventions to virtually eliminate duplication from its disparate systems. Two IBM Power Systems ™ servers run the SAP ERP and SAP CRM applications. IBM PowerVM ™ virtualization technology provides separate environments for each application and provides the resource allocation to help ensure that service levels are met. For example, the company uses mobile phones to take photographs and document information from its customers. It is able to download that information from the mobile devices to Web and then send the data to its SAP CRM and SAP ERP applications. An IBM System Storage ™ DS4700 storage device provides the application and data storage. IBM Global Technology Services provided implementation services and provides 24x7 maintenance and support for the software and hardware under a three-year contract. BENEFITS Manages receivable and inventory information more efficiently, improving vendor communication and shortening inventory turns Enables a higher degree of cross-selling to increase repeat business Decentralizes systems and virtualizes its server environment to create a more dynamic, scalable IT environment Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Automotive
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7SHL75&appname=crmd Queensland Motorways Intelligent toll system creates smarter traffic management The Need: Ten years ago, Australia’s third-largest city and the state capital of Queensland, Brisbane, formulated a strategy for making itself an economic powerhouse. Population growth has been an important factor in Brisbane’s emergence as a vital commercial center. If trade was the engine of economic growth, the city’s expanding population of skilled professionals was its lubricant. At some point, however, Brisbane reached a crossover point where its population growth began to exert an adverse impact in the form of traffic congestion. In recent years, the rising number of workers commuting to the port, airport and CBD, along with freight-laden truck traffic to and from the port, and a road infrastructure that hadn’t kept up, saw traffic congestion escalate with the Gateway Motorway and Bridge heavily affected. With the number of Central Business District (CBD) and Australia TradeCoast workers projected to nearly double in the next 20 years, the Government and Queensland Motorways, which owns and operates major toll roads and bridges in Brisbane, recognized the need to act boldly to lessen the chokehold of traffic on Brisbane’s future. The Government announced the $1.88 billion Gateway Upgrade Project designed to help bring the city’s road and bridge capacity in line with demand. However, while physical infrastructure investments were part of the long-term solution, the Government and Queensland Motorways realized that other sustainable, efficient and effective traffic mitigation strategies focused on understanding—and ultimately shaping—commuter driving behavior were also required. The Solution: To advance this vision, Queensland Motorways formed the Free-Flow Tolling Project and established partnerships with leading industry and technology vendors including IBM, Thales Australia and Vitronic, to put in place an intelligent roadside and central tolling management system that would complement its physical infrastructure investments by promoting the more efficient use of Queensland Motorways’ road network. IBM Global Business Services, had primary design responsibility for the Central System. The solution was implemented and tested by IBM Global Technology Services, relying on resources drawn from Europe, the Philippines, India and China, and working alongside Queensland Motorways project and technical staff. Architecturally, the solution is comprised of two main systems. The core function of the roadside system, which was developed by Thales Australia, in partnership with Vitronic, is to use multiple sensing technologies to identify vehicles as they move through toll gantries. Vehicles are identified either by an in-vehicle tag or by analyzing footage of their number plates using two optical character recognition (OCR) engines, one at the roadside and a Dacolian engine at the central system. A key part of IBM’s solution, known as the Identification, Rating and Interoperability Services (IRIS) subsystem, picks up the information generated at the roadside and uses stored business logic to execute a series of toll-related transactions. Upon receiving the roadside information, IRIS runs it against an SAP CRM database, within which the solution maintains a comprehensive record of vehicle and owner profile information. Based on this information—as well as other key parameters collected at the time of passage—the IRIS system calculates the required toll and sends it (via IBM WebSphere® MQ, the solution’s core middleware) to SAP FI-CA, which then issues a bill against the customer’s prepaid toll account, or stores the data so that payment can be applied up to three days after travel. Running on top of IBM WebSphere Application Server, the IRIS solution employs a mix of IBM Power Systems™ and BladeCenter® servers, as well as IBM System Storage™ DS8100 for customer data storage. IBM Rational® Portfolio Manager was used for project management. Maintaining a transportation infrastructure is an expensive proposition, as evidenced by the nearly $2 billion Queensland Motorways is spending on its current Gateway Upgrade Project alone. Queensland Motorways realized that to meet its future funding challenges, it needed to ensure maximum flexibility in its business model to efficiently capture revenue opportunities. To ensure this, Queensland Motorways called for a tolling solution able to be used as a shared service—following a modular, Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) approach—that would enable Queensland Motorways to offer free flow tolling as a service to other transit authorities in the future. What Makes it Smarter: - Captured vehicles data provides the foundation for targeted and flexible traffic shaping capability - Reduced congestion during peak traffic hours - Improved travel experience for Brisbane's commuters - Continued local economic prosperity by avoiding traffic snarls to and from commercial loading areas - Increased revenue opportunities for Queensland Motorways, providing a strong basis for funding future road infrastructure initiatives Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Travel & Transportation
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7VJQDR&appname=crmd SBI Sumishin Net Bank Accelerating new business growth by taking a new path to Internet banking The Need: SBI Sumishin Net Bank, a new entrant in the Internet banking industry in Japan, got the chance to differentiate itself in that market by choosing to provide full banking services on the Internet that differ from its competitors – a wider range of services than Internet banks had previously provided to their customers, including asset management. With competitors preparing for entry into the market and fierce competition expected, SBI Sumishin Net Bank recognized that launching its service as quickly as possible was vital. The Solution: The bank selected IBM Japan to design and build a new Internet banking platform. SBI Sumishin Net Bank judged the framework approach to banking solution development offered by IBM to be not only a method of lowering project risk but also a method of keeping costs low in the future by ensuring greater flexibility. Completed on schedule by IBM Japan, the implementation of SBI Sumishin Net Bank's new Internet bank platform made full use of the IBM SOA-driven Rapid Enterprise Renovation for Financial Services Systems (RER for FSS) framework – a series of interlocked products and technologies targeted to all aspects of the bank's operations. The result is a robust mission-critical banking system running on J2EE™. The solutions employed for the construction of SBI Sumishin Net Bank’s accounting system have enabled the opening of the first-ever Internet bank in Japan that provides full banking services, thanks to functionality that makes possible a wide range of products, services and packaged applications. What Makes it Smarter: SOA integration enables a single view of the client which includes information from across many lines of business at the bank and enables SBI to more quickly create customized products, cross-sell and up-sell in real time via the Web. During the construction of its business platform from scratch, SBI Sumishin Net Bank was the first Japanese bank to successfully introduce packaged products for its accounting applications. By combining a framework approach and industry-standard technology, SBI Sumishin Net Bank was able to start operating its system infrastructure in the Japanese banking market quickly in spite of the high level of difficulty of the project. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Banking
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7SGQGU&appname=crmd Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) Using new insight and integration to make public transport more efficient and sustainable The Need: As a result of heavy investment in its public transportation infrastructure, the Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) has created one of the most modern, affordable and heavily used public transportation networks in the world, with nearly 3 million people riding the bus and 1.6 million people riding the train on any given day. Because of ongoing population growth – projected at 50 percent in the coming decades – Singapore needs to find new ways to make public transportation more efficient and convenient in order to increase utilization and keep traffic congestion at bay. The LTA lacked what it needed most to accomplish this: the capacity to take a holistic, predictive approach to managing its transport network. The Solution: The LTA worked with IBM to create a seamless national transport fare system that enables riders to use a single card of their choice to pay for all modes of travel – bus, rail and taxis – as well as vehicle congestion charging and car parking. Card readers capture rider information at all points within the LTA network, and flexible, open middleware is used to create a single national fare processing clearinghouse. In designing the system, the LTA was very conscious of the need to accommodate its future initiatives and employed an SOA approach to give it the leeway to change aspects of its business model down the road. The solution simplifies and streamlines fare payment for riders, making it a virtually invisible part of their public transportation experience. It also allows the LTA to glean insights from the 20 million trip-related transactions generated each day – information on where, when and how riders are traveling – and translate them into a more convenient, affordable travel experience for Singapore’s citizens by optimizing routes, schedules and fares. What Makes it Smarter: Ability to configure more convenient bus and train routes and schedules based on analysis of multi-modal travel patterns Ability to accommodate multiple fare card issuers, increasing convenience for riders and lowering costs 80 percent reduction in revenue leakage from "lost" transactions 2% reduction in the overall cost of operation of the fare processing system while tripling its performance capacity to 20 million fare transactions per day WHAT MAKES IT SMARTER Integrated fare systems enable the Singapore Land Transport Authority to create holistic, detailed transportation profiles of riders that span all modes of travel, and insights drawn from rider data enable it to configure more convenient routes, schedules and fares – making public transport more attractive and increasing long-term ridership. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Case Study link Travel & Transportation Reference Link
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GNCS-7KJ3KE&appname=crmd Based in San Leandro, California, The North Face offers an extensive line of performance apparel, equipment and footwear. Pushing the boundaries of innovation, the company is the first choice of many of the world’s most accomplished climbers, mountaineers, extreme skiers, snowboarders, endurance runners and explorers. Business challenge: The North Face wanted to launch a new business-to-consumer Web site that would allow it to sell its high-performance outdoor gear and apparel directly to the public. To deliver an integrated brand experience that reinforced the company’s “Never Stop Exploring” spirit, The North Face wanted the Web site design to feature imagery, content and media to showcase many of the 50-plus athletes the company sponsors. Solution: The North Face worked with IBM Business Partner Zobrist Consulting Group, Inc., to implement a Web site architecture based on IBM WebSphere ® Commerce Enterprise software, IBM Lotus ® Web Content Management software and IBM OmniFind ® Discovery Edition software. The new architecture allows brand content to be woven throughout the site and showcases sophisticated imagery that inspires action by featuring athletes in their trials and triumphs. The site also leverages Web 2.0 technology, including ratings and reviews, video and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. The North Face hosts the solution on an IBM System p5 ® 580 platform running the IBM AIX ® V5.4 operating system. Benefits: The IBM solution supports Web traffic exceeding one million page views per day, enabling The North Face to meet and some cases exceed its sales expectations. In addition, the new solution allows marketing, merchandising and sales business users at The North Face to control and manage site content without help from IT. Finally, the globalized support of the architecture facilitates the rollout of international sites in multiple languages.
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7TXQ5S&appname=crmd University of North Carolina (UNC) Speeding the development of disease treatments BUSINESS CHALLENGE: The University of North Carolina (UNC), a major research and teaching institution, recognized the growing need for quality and Pay-for-Performance reporting within clinical care. It also realized that current Health System data mining/exporting practices on behalf of researchers was not sustainable or capable of generating the kind of information needed to create new treatments for major diseases. SOLUTION: In 2007, IBM Global Business Services team utilized the IBM Healthlink Solutions Roadmap Methodology to define a governance structure that would guide and oversee the development of a new health analytics environment. This process established better definition around governance and operational requirements to support the health analytics environment and subsequent data warehouse build. IBM was then engaged to complete the solution design, build and deployment for what would become the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H). The data warehouse is built on the IBM Health Integration Framework and takes advantage of InfoSphere and WebSphere software, running on System z mainframe and System p computers. UNC has now moved the data warehouse into production with a secure web portal providing access to anatomized cohort query selection, diabetes and inpatient data marts, business intelligence reports and analytics applications, and supporting clinical translation research. With the storage provided by CDW-H, researchers can analyze vast amounts of patient data uncovering trends in a matter of seconds. This avoids the time-consuming manual analysis of large quantities of patient records and treatment options. BENEFITS - The Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H), has enabled UNC to increase the timeliness of information available to researchers, staff and physicians, ultimately speeding the development of new treatments for diseases such as diabetes, cystic fibrosis and cancer - The warehouse has narrowed the time frame for clinical research significantly. Queries that would formerly take weeks now take seconds. - The entire workflow of preparatory research, through regulatory approval, to obtaining a data set will drop from months to weeks - The Diabetes and Patient Care data marts support general queries related to treatment of diabetes and measurement of outcomes, leading to improved patient care Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Healthcare
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7VAUSC&appname=crmd Client Name: Wuxi iPark Subtitle: A dynamic infrastructure frees up resources for new business The Need China is emerging as one of the world's major markets of software development and outsourcing services. However, the industry is facing several challenges, such as a lack of advanced software development platforms as well as a large technical skill shortage. To survive and be more competent in a rapidly evolving environment, software companies or ISVs recognize the need to have agile software development processes to shorten the lifecycle from product development to market. The Solution IBM Research-China teamed with a regional center of innovation to enable ISVs located in the center to remotely access a vast computing environment for project incubation, development and testing, paying for services based on usage. This utility-based service is delivered via the Web and integrates technologies and concepts from cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and software engineering as a service (SEaaS) and includes operational and hosting services. What Makes it Smarter This new business model allows ISVs to conserve energy and resources and reduce their IT investment, freeing up capital and resources for other business activities. Thanks to the open standards-based technology architecture and an innovative development methodology, environment allows software development to be done by team members located in different cities in China in a shared IT environment. As a result, ISVs can increase their response to market demands and requirements. The new cloud computing offering also helps ISVs reach new markets by providing the ability to sell their software solutions hosted as Web-based services to customers around the world. By providing advanced IT resources and a value-added service, this center operates under a new business model. Unlike other software parks or science parks in China, this one can now provide greater services beyond the typical office space, general management support, and basic facilities, such as water and electricity. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External/Unblinded Ongoing Industry : Computer Services
- Client Name A Manhattan Bank Subtitle Preventing fraud and criminal attacks in real time around the globe The Need: A large international bank in Manhattan with a diverse business portfolio was vulnerable to fraud because its many legacy financial crime detection systems were expensive to run, lacked flexibility to respond to evolving threats and regulations and did not leverage cross-channel information. The Solution: The bank chose a solution from IBM and Actimize, a NICE Company, that will enable the bank to analyze data and prevent fraud in real-time, across various channels, such as the Internet, call center cards, payments and ATM systems – leveraging a single, scalable and robust IBM technology platform. The solution can anticipate attacks and learn from past fraudulent and criminal activity to protect the integrity of all systems. What Makes it Smarter: Using self-learning abilities and complex analytics capabilities, the solution can detect new and evolving criminal behavior and take preemptive action to prevent fraud and theft in all systems across all business units Giving administrators and other principals the insight they need by generating meaningful reports and helping the bank’s internal experts to develop new proprietary fraud models. Helping to manage fraud investigations across the enterprise. The solution support collaboration across the organization. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: Internal Ongoing project Industry : Banking /Financial
- Schweizerische Mobiliar Versicherungsgesellschaft AG http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-84SKWV&appname=crmd
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- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype= CR&subtype = NA&htmlfid =0GLOS-759SVA&appname= crmd Headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts, Welch Foods Inc. (Welch’s) is well known for its fruit juices and jellies. The company offers approximately 400 products, including refrigerated juices and cocktails, frozen and shelf-stable concentrates, sparkling juice cocktails and a variety of single-serve products. In addition, Welch’s - a wholly owned subsidiary - is the food-processing and marketing arm of the National Grape Cooperative Association, Inc., a grower-owned agricultural cooperative with more than 1,400 farming members. In an effort to lower its operating costs and increase business flexibility across its enterprise, Welch’s planned to replace its proprietary IT infrastructure with a virtualized x86-based open architecture from Linux that would support out-of-the-box software. Welch’s rolled out a Linux® operating system and planned to deploy 31 off-the-shelf modules of the Oracle E-Business Suite enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. While trying to launch Oracle – Demantra and the first eight components of the new ERP solution, the company found that its 30+ Dell servers with several 4-node RAC clusters were having difficulties supporting the new software and load. Welch’s engaged IBM Business Partner the Advanced Technology Services Group (ATS) to assess its current situation and then design and implement a solution. ATS suggested that the company complement the new x86-based open architecture with more powerful IBM System p5™ 570 servers. The company divided three servers into a total of 30 logical partitions and configured them to provide a fully virtualized, clustered environment. ATS also implemented a storage area network (SAN) composed of three IBM System Storage™ DS6800 disk systems. Following the hardware implementation, Welch’s contracted ATS for ongoing support. ATS delivered a highly available, reliable and scalable virtualized solution to help Welch’s lower its operating costs and increase enterprisewide flexibility. With the System p5 servers’ virtualization technology, the client is able to rapidly add off-the-shelf software to its Linux environment. Additionally, Welch’s can run its Oracle reports on the new platform in only 43 minutes, achieving an excellent price/performance ratio by gaining 2.8 times the throughput at only 1.9 times the cost of its previous servers. By teaming with ATS, Welch’s benefited from the world-class knowledge and experience of an IBM Business Partner systems integrator.
- This case study shows how The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Egypt implemented two IBM Power ™ 570 servers running IBM AIX ®, IBM PowerVM ™ Dynamic Logical Partitioning and Micro-Partitioning, and IBM System Storage ™ DS4800 to improve performance, scalability and availability.
- Energen Corporation (Energen) is among the top 20 independent exploration and production companies based its U.S. oil and gas reserves. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Energen has averaged more than 30 percent annual growth in earnings and total shareholder return over the last five years. Its regulated business, Alabama Gas Corporation (Alagasco), is the largest distributor of natural gas in Alabama, serving around 455,000 customers. Energen was facing performance and support issues for its SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) application, which was running on midrange Sun Solaris servers. The company wanted to reduce the total cost of ownership—in particular by cutting its licensing costs for the Oracle databases supporting its SAP system—and to stop the sprawl of servers in its data center by using virtualization technology. Because of deteriorating system performance and worsening support from its IT vendor, Energen wanted to refresh its midrange server environment, which had grown to 20 machines, which represented a significant investment in both hardware and software licenses. Energen consolidated 20 Sun servers to two IBM System p5™ 570 servers and migrated its entire SAP ERP environment—including functionality for financials (accounts receivable and accounts payable), human resources and payroll—onto the new IBM servers. IBM contributed toward the cost of the migration and consolidation of the SAP software, which was carried out with the assistance of consultants certified by SAP. IBM Business Partner Mainline Information Systems put together an analysis to show how moving to virtual servers on System p5 technology could significantly cut Oracle licensing costs in addition to reducing hardware costs. By consolidating its SAP and Oracle environment onto virtualized System p5 servers, Energen was able to reduce its software licensing costs by 40 percent, which contributed to the US$500,000 in annual savings the client achieved by migrating to the System p platform for its SAP environment. The migration has given the client a more compact and efficient infrastructure that combines significantly lower capital and operational costs with better performance and flexibility. Since going into production with the new platform, the client has experienced no unplanned outages. In addition, the consolidation consumes significantly less floor space and power.
- Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) is the second-largest bottler of Coca-Cola products in the United States, operating in 11 states. CCBCC enjoys net sales of more than US$1.4 billion. CCBCC planned to upgrade its SAP landscape, and prior to the upgrade it decided to shift to Unicode and a new database in anticipation of new SAP production releases. It sought a database that could help it reduce costs and to optimize performance and manageability in its SAP environment. Prior to the SAP upgrade, CCBCC converted to Unicode and migrated from Oracle to the IBM DB2 ® 9 database with the deep compression feature. Migrating to the IBM DB2 database in conjunction with an SAP software upgrade and Unicode conversion enabled CCBCC to avoid duplicating project tasks such as backup and testing, and it helped keep the cost of the migration as low as possible. The migration project for the entire SAP R/3 Enterprise software landscape took eight weeks in total, including two test iterations for the 1TB production database. Combining the Unicode upgrade with a database migration paid off for CCBCC - enabling it to leverage synergies throughout the whole migration process and to eliminate the duplication of processes such as backup and testing. The transfer of database management skills from Oracle to the DB2 database also went smoothly for CCBC, which had strong in-house Oracle skills. Overall, by moving to the DB2 database in its SAP upgrade, CCBCC achieved the following benefits: - Lower TCO - Forty percent reduction in database size - Better performance - manufacturing runs are over 65 percent faster - Better integration of the database in SAP tools - Reduced database administrator workload to manage and administrate the DB2 database
- The Würth Gruppe is one of the worldwide leaders in fastening, fixing and assembly systems, including screws, dowels, plugs, chemical products, furniture, construction fittings, tools, stock keeping and picking systems. It employs more than 5,000 people in 86 countries and records and annual turnover of €7.7 billon annually. The growing company operates a wide range of SAP applications and had extended its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system continuously over the years to meet the demands of its customers and an increasing transaction workload. Its server technology was approaching its limits and upgrading it was not economically viable. The company wanted to upgrade its ERP applications to SAP ERP 6.0 software, which would require an increase in overall computing capacity. Würth also ran SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence and SAP NetWeaver Portal components. An automated operation, Würth needed a highly available platform that would enable the SAP applications to remain online during business operations—24 hours a day, five days a week (24x5). Würth settled on six IBM Power 570 servers featuring IBM POWER6™ processors, each running 16 CPUs and 300 gigabytes of memory. The Power 570 servers offered new functionalities that helped optimize the SAP applications, the decimal floating-point feature of the POWER6 processor, being an example—helps significantly improve processing times whenever SAP applications use the datatype for calculations. Würth knew that in some SAP benchmarks, POWER6 processors could provide twice the performance of systems based on x86 processors with the same number of cores, as well as a 50 percent increase in performance over the IBM POWER5+™ processor. The company’s applications were distributed across the servers in logical partitions (LPARs), so IBM PowerVM™ technologies were deployed to increase utilization, improve performance, lower energy consumption and reduce hardware costs. Würth deployed four IBM High Availability Cluster Microprocessing (HACMP) clusters to provide failover protection, should a server experience an outage. Würth is now able to conduct planned outages without interrupting end users or disrupting the SAP applications. Harald Holl, head of systems technology at Würth says, “The introduction of POWER6 virtualization technologies, HACMP, PowerVM Live Partition Mobility and Virtual I/O server will contribute to increased resilience, improved reliability and enhanced SAP application response.” The IBM solution improves SAP application performance by 30 percent and enables the company to plan system downtime without any service interruption to users. And planned application outages for hardware and firmware maintenance and upgrades can be avoided by moving the partitions to an alternate server, while workloads running on servers that require maintenance can be moved to another server until repairs are completed. The capabilities of PowerVM technology provides systems management flexibility and improved systems availability.
- IBM clients or prospective clients: Please contact your IBM representative for more details about this reference. IBM presenters: For more information, refer to appropriate contacts in the IBM client reference database at http://w3-3.ibm.com/sales/ssi/crmd.html . IBM Business Partner presenters: Add your company's references or search for references in the PartnerWorld client reference database at http://partners.boulder.ibm.com/src/partnerrefs.nsf/HomePage?OpenForm ] Bharti Airtel grows at a stunning pace by keeping its focus on the customer – through strategic outsourcing with IBM http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=RF&subtype=CS&htmlfid=JSTS-7C6M6P&appname=crmd BACKGROUND: Based in New Delhi, Bharti Airtel is India's largest private sector telecom operator, with a strong presence in mobile communications, fixed line services, and domestic and international long distance services. Bharti Airtel is India's sixth-largest company by market capitalization, with more than 57 million customers and $4.2 billion in annual revenues in 2007. As a leading Indian telecom company, Bharti Airtel is in a fertile environment for explosive growth; with a large, young and tech savvy population, an economy whose growth rate is second only to China and telephone penetration of just seven percent, demand for communications services in India is high. Market growth has outstripped forecasts, and no operator has been better poised to capitalize on this opportunity than Bharti Airtel. CHALLENGE: Bharti Airtel needed to maximize flexibility and growth potential by adopting a business-driven framework for integration, allowing it to implement and deliver new services rapidly. With competition intensifying in the Indian telecom services market, Bharti Airtel needed to find a way to focus on developing new services that could set it apart from the competition and strengthen its customer relationships. Bharti Airtel also needed to make major investments in IT infrastructure to service its growing base of subscribers. In addition to the inherent risks of a large fixed investment, Bharti Airtel faced an added financial risk from a steady decline in India's average revenue per user (ARPU) for mobile telecom services, the result of government mandated pricing changes. Thus, while Bharti Airtel realized that it was essential to invest in its future growth, factors unique to the Indian market increased the risks of making capital investments. SOLUTION: Bharti Airtel entered into a comprehensive ten-year agreement with IBM to transform its processes and take on the management of its IT infrastructure. A key driver of Bharti Airtel's decision to outsource its IT activities to IBM was the desire to channel its internal energies and resources into capitalizing on a spectacular market opportunity rather than on the enabling platforms needed to do so. IBM has continually invested in the optimization and consolidation of Bharti Airtel's infrastructure—key components of which include IBM System p and System x servers as well as IBM TotalStorage® Enterprise Storage Servers. IBM Global Technology Services performs ongoing software maintenance and development, while IBM Strategic Outsourcing provides installation services, help desk services and the ongoing management of Bharti Airtel’s IT environment. The new platform provides a standardized framework for Bharti Airtel to integrate its channels and customer-facing processes—enabling a more seamless customer experience, higher customer satisfaction and more profitable growth. By integrating the account activation process with systems such as billing, provisioning and order management, Bharti Airtel was able to cut the time required to activate new mobile accounts. The integration framework also led to stronger business intelligence capabilities, which enabled the company to maximize the value of their customer relationships through cross selling and market segmentation. BENEFITS: Ability to process 1.5 million new customers per month • Improved cross-selling and targeting and a more seamless, efficient total customer experience through end-to-end integration of customer-facing processes • Optimization of business processes and infrastructure through flexible, standardized integration framework • Outsourcing of technology enables Bharti Airtel to focus resources on growing the business • Flexible pricing model enables Bharti Airtel to avoid major increases in capital expenditures Reduction in the time required to activate new mobile accounts by 90 percent QUOTES: “ By working along with us to transform our go-to-market strategies and reinvent our internal processes, IBM has been a partner for the innovation that we see as essential in our ability to sustain our rapid growth.” Jai Menon, Group CIO, Bharti Enterprises and Director (IT & Innovation) Bharti Airtel "Our new strategy is all about delivering a truly differentiated experience, and having the flexibility to continually improve the customer experience.” Jai Menon “ It’s our ability to bring activation from four days to two hours, and our billing cycles from 15 days to two hours. It's our ability to handle more and more customers.” Jai Menon
- Client name: Iskra Mehanizmi Industry: Industrial Products Profile: A Slovenian manufacturer of a wide range of commercial and consumer electromechanical products www. iskra-mehanizmi.si/
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- IBM clients or prospective clients: Please contact your IBM representative for more details about this reference. IBM presenters: For more information, refer to appropriate contacts in the IBM client reference database at http://w3-3.ibm.com/sales/ssi/crmd.html . IBM Business Partner presenters: Add your company's references or search for references in the PartnerWorld client reference database at http://partners.boulder.ibm.com/src/partnerrefs.nsf/HomePage?OpenForm ] Find the complete reference here: ADD URL HERE University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Rewriting the rules on IT investment to facilitate tomorrow’s healthcare innovations Business Challenge: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s ( UPMC) predominant focus is on transforming its entire IT infrastructure to lay the groundwork for the future, an effort that is far reaching in scope and subject to major challenges—most or all of which are shared by major healthcare providers today. UPMC, Pennsylvania’s largest integrated healthcare delivery network, sought to lower the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure to enable the continued investment in next-generation clinical systems and to lay the foundation for the best possible patient care. Solution: UPMC joined with IBM in an 8-year, $402 million partnership designed to transform its IT infrastructure. The deal was viewed as a watershed in how IT vendors and their customers work together. The most telling indicator of the project’s success is the difference between UPMC’s actual capital and operating costs (related to IT) and those that would have been incurred had it taken no action. A key backdrop for this comparison is the surge in processing and storage volume that resulted from the faster-than-projected expansion in the scope of UPMC’s industry-leading electronic health records adoption. Had no action been taken—UPMC would have needed to more than double its number of servers. Instead, it was able to reduce the number of servers by two thirds, and the consequent reduction and avoidance of $30 million in capital and operating costs. By simplifying its IT infrastructure through virtualization, UPMC is able to support more server capacity without the need to hire any additional support staff. On top of that, the server consolidation afforded by its virtualization strategy enabled UPMC to reduce its floor space requirements. The transformation making these benefits possible is being implemented by IBM Global Technology Services. The modular, standardized nature of the solution means UPMC can integrate new acquisitions into its network faster—enabling the more prompt realization of the acquisition’s operational and clinical goals. Benefits: $30 million in capital and operating cost reductions through virtualization-driven efficiencies 150 percent increase in processing capacity with no increase in IT support costs 40 percent reduction in IT infrastructure floor space requirements, freeing up space for revenue generating services 67 percent reduction in number of physical servers Expected increase in average utilization per server from three percent to nearly 80 percent Faster integration of acquired healthcare operations Why it Matters:: By transforming its IT infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization, UPMC has achieved more than a quantum improvement in resource efficiency. It has fundamentally changed the link between processing and resource needs—enabling it to meet an ambitious clinical agenda with a far lower rate of IT investment growth. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Complete Industry: Healthcare
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- IBM clients or prospective clients: Please contact your IBM representative for more details about this reference. IBM presenters: For more information, refer to appropriate contacts in the IBM client reference database at http://w3-3.ibm.com/sales/ssi/crmd.html . IBM Business Partner presenters: Add your company's references or search for references in the PartnerWorld client reference database at http://partners.boulder.ibm.com/src/partnerrefs.nsf/HomePage?OpenForm ] Australian Open http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=RF&subtype=CS&htmlfid=LWIS-7JMQEX&appname=crmd
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7D6MAU&appname=crmd SPAR Switzerland is the Swiss operating arm of SPAR Handels AG, Germany’s seventh largest grocery wholesaler and retailer. A marketplace leader, SPAR Switzerland maintains an annual growth rate of roughly 15 percent and generates annual sales of around €525 million. Based in St. Gallen, SPAR Switzerland employs 1,000 full-time staff. SPAR Switzerland had standardized several of its business operations on a suite of SAP applications, supported by IBM System p™ hardware. With the release of new SAP software boasting extended functionality, the organization realized that its existing infrastructure, while reliable, lacked the power to support with the upgraded SAP software. SPAR Switzerland wanted to update its server environment with the intention of leveraging advanced virtualization features to draw the most value from its planned SAP software upgrade. After running several benchmark tests, SPAR Switzerland chose to load the new SAP software onto a pair of IBM System p5™ 570 servers located in two separate offices. The organization leverages the platform’s IBM High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP™) feature to protect its data. The client also leverages the virtualization features of the hardware to create eleven separate logical partitions (LPARs) for production, integration and test environments for the SAP software. At present, there are 500 named users accessing more than 1.6TB of SAP data that is hosted on an IBM System Storage™ DS8100 disk system. SPAR Switzerland uses the SAP software to support its core operations (e.g., finance and control, materials management, sales and distribution, warehouse management). The new IBM solution has enabled SPAR Switzerland to boost the performance of its SAP applications by 40 percent and to create a highly available environment that nearly eliminates downtime. In addition, the SAP software is now more responsive, with response times dropping from 500–600ms to 300–400ms. From this improvement alone, SPAR Switzerland estimates it has realized six-figure cost savings. As an added bonus, the new system is much easier to maintain, reducing administration, maintenance and operational costs.
- Con Edison Driving demand reduction by promoting energy-efficient IT BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Consolidated Edison Company of New York (Con Edison), a regulated utility, provides electric service in New York City and most of Westchester County. Facing greater operational challenges in building out its infrastructure, a state-mandated 15 percent reduction in energy consumption by 2015 and a recognition of the need to reduce emissions, Con Edison needed to develop a demand-side management (DSM) program. For DSM to work, customers need a granular, timely way to measure consumption. However, only one in four IT managers has visibility into their data center’s energy consumption. Con Edison needed a way to provide customers with both visibility into consumption and expertise in designing data centers for maximum efficiency. SOLUTION: Con Edison and IBM formed a first-of-a-kind energy efficiency partnership that combines the complementary skill sets of an IT provider and energy services company, and delivers it to customers in a seamless, team-based manner. Sustained efficiency improvements are certified by an independent third party, Neuwing Energy Ventures, a leading verifier of energy efficiency projects and marketer of Energy Efficiency Certificates (EECs). Neuwing Energy conducts a thorough energy audit of the customer’s data center, establishing a baseline. IBM works with the customer to optimize the design of the data center, leveraging its expertise in data center energy efficiency and virtualization, as well as its industry-leading line of energy-efficient servers and storage devices and a range of advanced energy management products such as IBM Active Energy Manager software. Neuwing Energy conducts a follow-up energy audit and customers are then issued one EEC for each megawatt hour per year in reduced energy consumption. EECs can be traded for cash on the growing energy efficiency certificate market, or otherwise retained to demonstrate reductions in energy use and associated CO 2 emissions. Through server virtualization, the customers that have taken part in the program thus far have been able to increase utilization levels of their servers and storage devices, while freeing up valuable floor space in their data centers. BENEFITS Average of 42 percent reduction in annual data center energy consumption and associated costs Increase in environmental responsibility and sustainability Increased system utilization through data center virtualization and consolidation Ability to earn energy efficiency certificates to apply for demand reduction incentives or document progress toward sustainability targets More flexibility to pursue computing intensive business initiatives Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing Industry : Case study link Energy & Utilities Reference link
- IBM clients or prospective clients: Please contact your IBM representative for more details about this reference. IBM presenters: For more information, refer to appropriate contacts in the IBM client reference database at http://w3-3.ibm.com/sales/ssi/crmd.html . IBM Business Partner presenters: Add your company's references or search for references in the PartnerWorld client reference database at http://partners.boulder.ibm.com/src/partnerrefs.nsf/HomePage?OpenForm ] Groupe Mutuel Putting a premium on business flexibility by redesigning core processes Business Challenge: Based in Martigny, Switzerland, Groupe Mutuel provides a wide range of insurance services to more than one million customers. The approach that deeply defines Groupe Mutuel’s business model is the company’s effort to cultivate and maintain the strengths, character and identity of each of its 14 operating units within their respective locales. By maintaining a local presence — in terms of brand, customer service and other differentiating factors — Groupe Mutuel aims to preserve within each unit the qualities that made it successful to begin with. For this business model to work, however, Groupe Mutuel realized it needed to create a common set of optimized processes at the core of its operations, which would give the company the flexibility and efficiency it needed to win in the dynamic Swiss market. Solution: Groupe Mutuel turned to IBM Global Business Services (GBS) for assistance in designing its new process environment and for the flexible technology infrastructure needed to support it. GBS led Groupe Mutuel’s corps of internal business process experts and analysts through the IBM Component Business Modeling (CBM) methodology. The CBM methodology enabled Groupe Mutuel to gain a deep and fundemental view of how the company’s processes needed to work to enable maximum efficiency and competitive differentiation. Using the CBM as a roadmap, GBS helped Groupe Mutuel redesign and rebuild its core infrastructure with SOA capabilities, principally the ability to create a layer of abstracted services that can be easily redeployed in any of the company’s operations with little to no integration effort. The main enabler of this capability is IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, which simplifies connectivity between Groupe Mutuel’s backend systems. At the hardware level, Groupe Mutuel consolidated a large number of its existing servers with IBM BladeCenter HS20 blade servers and a pair of IBM System p5 595 servers. The company’s older applications run on two IBM System i 595 servers, while storage is handled by IBM TotalStorage 3500 Tape Library devices. With the infrastructure foundation in place, GBS turned to the process side, providing Groupe Mutuel with guidance on business process transformation strategies that drew heavily from best practices from other IBM insurance engagements around the world. IBM is leading a series of change management seminars and workshops to propagate the benefit of process change more broadly to employees. The most important benefit of Groupe Mutuel’s work with IBM is that it makes a good business model even better. While Groupe Mutuel can continue to leverage the local market strengths of its individual units, the fact that it can do so on a foundation of flexible, standardized and lower-cost processes makes it a more nimble and efficient competitor. Benefits: Reduction in operational costs through the standardization of backend processes • Reduction in the time and cost of integrating new acquisitions via SOA-based integration • Increase in customer satisfaction and retention through reduction in reenrollment and claims cycle time • Reduction in time to market with new insurance products • Reduction in time required to comply with changing regulations • Improvements in the cross-selling and proactive customer management capabilities through a portfolio view of the customer Transformation at a glance: Groupe Mutuel fully capitalized on the changing market landscape through a series of successful acquisitions. By enabling the optimization of core processes across the entire business—while maintaining each business unit’s unique market identity—Groupe Mutuel’s new SOA enables the company’s operational efficiency to catch up with its rapid growth . Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Complete Industry: Insurance
- VIEW/NOTES PAGE Mode – PRESS F5 or DOUBLE CLICK ON SLIDE TO VIEW SLIDE IN FULL SCREEN Leroy Merlin Companhia Brasileira de Bricolagem Synopsis: A home-improvement retailer in Brazil increases revenue by ten percent and decreases downtime by 40 percent when it aligns with IBM Global Business Services and engages IBM Global Technology Services - Worldwide Strategic Outsourcing to host business-critical applications and an IBM Tivoli solution as well as an IBM System p technology-based grid solution and IBM System p5 and IBM System x servers Customer Background : Headquartered in Lille, France, Leroy Merlin is a major home-improvement retailer with more than 300 locations around the world. In 1998, Leroy Merlin opened its first outlet in Brazil, called Leroy Merlin Companhia Brasileira de Bricolagem (Leroy Merlin Brazil). It runs 12 stores in various cities. Leroy Merlin Brazil employs more than 2,400 people in Brazil and earns approximately US$232.6 million in annual revenue. Business Need: Pursuing its corporate growth strategy, Leroy Merlin Brazil was preparing to grow very quickly. However, the retailer was not properly equipped with an IT environment to support such rapid growth. Leroy Merlin Brazil needed a more scalable and suitable enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution; it had been using the same system used by the rest of the Leroy Merlin enterprise, but its needs were different from the divisions in Europe and Asia. While the company clearly needed a new program, however, the technology department lacked the knowledge and time to evaluate business processes and determine the requirements for a more appropriate system. Further complicating matters, Leroy Merlin Brazil did not have an adequate hardware infrastructure to reliably support a new ERP system. The home-improvement retailer needed a centralized, highly available infrastructure to provide 24x7 system uptime for a new ERP solution. The company sought a competent IT solutions provider to spearhead the project. Solution Implementation: For the first stage of the project, Leroy Merlin Brazil engaged IBM Global Business Services to help it choose an ERP platform that would serve the company's present and future needs. Based on a recommendation from the Global Business Services group, the client chose the Brazilian software company Gemco to provide the new ERP system. IBM worked with the client to tailor the platform to its needs, and then it suggested that Leroy Merlin Brazil run the customized system on an IBM grid solution so that it could easily scale the software as necessary. Because the client had a team of only seven people available to perform strategic IT services, Leroy Merlin Brazil engaged IBM Global Technology Services - Worldwide Strategic Outsourcing to build, host and manage a grid solution to support its new ERP application. The Worldwide Strategic Outsourcing team deployed IBM System p5 servers as the foundation for an ERP computing grid, including a three-node grid to support the client's business-critical ERP application. Each node runs the Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC) cluster database. The system also hosts the company's LG Informática FPw payroll program, which is supported by Citrix Metaframe optimization software. Finally, the client installed IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Databases V5.1 and IBM Tivoli NetView V7.1 software onto all of the servers involved in the solution. It took just six months for the Worldwide Strategic Outsourcing team to implement the grid solution, which provides Leroy Merlin Brazil's 12 nationwide stores with access to the primary data center and business-critical applications for 12 hours per day via a wide area network (WAN). With the total IBM solution, the client can support approximately 900 users and 300,000 transactions per minute. Benefits: - Increased its revenue by ten percent - Reduced resource consumption by 30 percent - Improved customer satisfaction by 30 percent Decreased downtime by 40 percent. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: Industry : External Complete/Ongoing Retail
- 10/31/11 This organization is an independent IT company with nearly 200 employees that acts as the global service provider of IT and process management for its parent company. The company has service centers in Austria, the United States, Brazil, India and China. The company’s large paper and turbo divisions had been using a variety of SAP software for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resources (HR) functions that ran on 30 different servers and supported up to 5,000 users. The storage environment comprised five mixed Hewlett-Packard and IBM systems. To maintain its rapid growth pace, the company needed to drive business efficiency and cost-effectiveness by overhauling the hardware environment supporting its SAP software. The client engaged IBM Global Technology Services to migrate its SAP systems and databases from 30 physical servers onto 30 logical partitions (LPARs) on four IBM System p5™ 570 servers. One IBM System Storage™ DS8100 device stores Oracle database and SAP data as well as other server and application data, leveraging virtualization technology to provide a single pool of storage capacity that is simple to manage and easy to expand. The Global Technology Services team spent 12 months on the consolidation project, and it continues to provide ongoing services for the client. With the IBM solution deployed by the IBM Global Technology Services group, the client is able to use virtualization technologies to help it respond more quickly to dynamic business requirements. With an infrastructure that now contains fewer but higher-performing servers, the client enjoys an environment that is easier and less costly to manage, that improves employee productivity, and that reduces licensing and hardware costs by 20 to 30 percent.
- This organization is a leading manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) pumps. The company also makes electric motors for the pumps and for separate merchandising. The manufacturer operates facilities in the Americas, Europe and Asia to produce ten million pumps each year. Because the manufacturer planned to upgrade its existing SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to the SAP ERP 2005 version, it needed additional processing power in its hardware environment. Its existing infrastructure comprised two IBM eServer™ pSeries® 690 servers located at its primary data center and disaster recovery site. Although the servers performed well, the company’s SAP ERP 2005 application was more demanding. Moreover, the manufacturer wanted to protect its data from power outages and catastrophic events by investing in a comprehensive backup and recovery program. The organization upgraded to two IBM eServer p5 595 servers using IBM Parallel Environment for AIX® 5L™ technology. The eServer p5 595 servers boast IBM Advanced POWER™ virtualization capabilities. To manage the business-critical eServer p5 595 servers, the client signed a contract with IBM Global Technology Services that includes technical maintenance and support of the servers, the AIX operating system and the IBM High-Availability Cluster Multiprocessing (HACMP™) arrangement. To protect its business-critical data, the client installed IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager for Databases V5.3 and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Enterprise Resource Planning V5.3 software, which back up and restore data in the event of a power outage or disaster. With the assistance of IBM technology and services, the manufacturer successfully operates one of the largest SAP R/3 Tier 2 implementations in the world, with more than 5,000 users who enjoy subsecond response time. By upgrading to the powerful eServer p5 595 servers, the client has been able to reduce operational expenses and improve process efficiency. In addition, the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager applications reduce business risk and eliminate the need for costly backup procedures and hardware. With the Tivoli software, the company gains peace of mind from knowing that its data is well protected and available whenever it is needed.
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- Whirlpool Focusing on operational excellence as global growth shifts into high gear BUSINESS CHALLENGE: While globalization creates a host of new market opportunities for manufacturers, it also tends to intensify -- and in some cases redefine -- the terms of competition. Put simply, global manufacturers need to do a lot of things right to perform successfully on a bigger and more demanding stage. Given the core importance of scale-based efficiency in the global manufacturing business model, perhaps no need is more basic than the vigorous and consistent growth of the business, through organic means, acquisitions or both. Whirlpool conducted a top-to-bottom analysis of what it needed to do differently as a business to succeed. It framed its analysis by asking itself: How does a company that grew large as a U.S.-centric distributor for Sears transform itself into an even larger global consumer packaged goods company? While the company saw IT issues as part of the equation, it viewed business processes as the true focal point of its efforts. To this end, Whirlpool spent several months drilling down into the processes of each of its lines of business and benchmarked them against the industry. Among its key findings was the discovery that Whirlpool had roughly 100 separate instances of SAP running throughout the company -- a figure that, for all its IT implications, was seen first and foremost as an indicator of the gradual, yet unchecked proliferation of business processes that had occurred over time. Underlying the problem was a chronic and self-perpetuating cycle: because processes were largely unique to a particular line of business or manufacturing location, each incremental addition brought with it a unique set of metrics, product taxonomies, part numbers and other support systems, producing a highly heterogeneous environment that made optimization across the global enterprise next to impossible. SOLUTION: Whirlpool turned to IBM Global Business Services for help. To stay ahead of rising competition, Whirlpool is implementing best practices across all of its lines of business and integrating them to optimize its business processes across its entire global value chain. Becoming a more globally integrated enterprise enables Whirlpool to achieve "operational excellence" -- the delivery of the right product mix to local markets while maximizing the efficiency of its global operations, from R&D to retail merchandising. While broadly aimed at process standardization, the IBM role in Whirlpool Corporation's transformation was multilayered. Its first task was to establish a deep understanding of the company's key processes that would become a starting point for optimization efforts. With that established, IBM leveraged its process expertise and global track record in the consumer packaged goods space to begin laying out the groundwork for its future process framework. An important part of this effort was determining which processes were best suited to global deployment and which -- due to local market requirements -- would be best deployed regionally. As for the processes themselves, IBM is leveraging its broad portfolio of industry best practices, an intellectual asset that figured prominently in Whirlpool Corporation's selection of IBM. If there is a big picture to the company's transformation story, it is that the key to achieving operational excellence is in moving beyond the standardization of core business processes to actual value chain integration. BENEFITS Substantially reduced finished goods inventory Faster product development cycles Improved ability to focus on the most profitable products and features More effective allocation of trade partner incentives Optimized product merchandising Streamlined parts inventories through standardized parts taxonomies Improved ability to manage the company and optimize performance on a global basis by virtue of standardized business processes and performance metrics Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Case Study Link Electronics Reference Link
- One of the top-rated public research universities in the United States, the University of Cincinnati (UC) is home to more than 35,000 students. Cooperative Education, in which students alternate periods of study with professional work, is a much imitated initiative that was instituted at UC in 1906. UC was operating on COBOL-based applications that resided on an aging mainframe. To deliver the administrative services that a university of its size was expected to provide, UC began looking for a new solution. It wanted to find a suite of financial and human resources (HR) applications that could provide new functionality and that could also help UC align its processes with best practices in the educational arena. UC chose the SAP ERP Financials solution, SAP ERP Human Capital Management (ERP HCM) application and SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence software for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. IBM Global Business Services and IBM Business Partner Sirius were chosen to design and manage the project. The SAP ERP solutions were deployed on an IBM System p™ 670 server, and the SAP ERP HCM application was deployed on an IBM System p 570 server. IBM virtualization technologies enable UC to utilize the hardware more effectively and save on energy costs. IBM DB2® information management software is used as the database for the SAP application environment and IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager for Enterprise Resource Planning software is used to provide simple management of the entire environment. UC now has a modern, centralized ERP solution to handle its financial and human resources processes. It has begun migrating its applications from the mainframe onto the new, more cost-effective hardware and hopes to soon move its student information system off the mainframe as well, creating significant cost savings on hardware licensing and maintenance. Mark Young, director of infrastructure services group at UC says, “The IBM system p servers and the DB2 and Tivoli software form an ideal infrastructure for our new SAP applications.”
- IBM clients or prospective clients: Please contact your IBM representative for more details about this reference. IBM presenters: For more information, refer to appropriate contacts in the IBM client reference database at http://w3-3.ibm.com/sales/ssi/crmd.html . IBM Business Partner presenters: Add your company's references or search for references in the PartnerWorld client reference database at http://partners.boulder.ibm.com/src/partnerrefs.nsf/HomePage?OpenForm ] Find the complete reference here: ADD URL HERE
- 1-800-FLOWERS.COM Creating an e-commerce platform for the future Business Challenge 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, INC. is the world’s largest florist and gift shop, with revenues approaching US$1 billion. The company has a thorough understanding of the “gifting” market space in which it operates, and sees great potential for synergy by offering multiple specialty brands. The 1-800-FLOWERS.COM strategy has been to grow three ways: organic growth, internal business development and strategic acquisitions. Today, it has 14 brands that sell everything from popcorn to gift baskets to gourmet food and children’s gifts. The strategy has given 1-800-FLOWERS.COM a broad and diverse portfolio, but it also created a business challenge. To fully realize the benefits of its multibrand strategy, they must be unified behind the scenes, but as is usually the case, each new acquisition brought with it a different set of business processes and technology, resulting in a large number of siloed operations that were difficult to integrate. To better enable synergies between its 14 gifting brands, create greater business agility, and reach its goal of becoming one of the Top 10 among Internet Retailer Top 500 companies, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, INC. needed to replace multiple, diverse, siloed e-commerce systems with a unified technology platform. Solution To realize its vision of synergy among its 14 brands and meet ambitious growth goals, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, INC.—the world’s largest florist and gift shop—is deploying a single e-commerce platform. The solution, based on IBM WebSphere Commerce, is designed to replace multiple siloed systems. The platform, running on IBM Power Systems™ hardware, also has to integrate seamlessly with the company’s existing systems. The 1-800-FLOWERS.COM platform will remain in place, and most of the other brands will be migrated to the new WebSphere Commerce-based system over the coming year. In the interim, everything needs to continue functioning transparently. To accomplish this, the service-oriented architecture solution includes IBM WebSphere Message Broker and IBM WebSphere MQ, which form an enterprise service bus that ties the legacy systems together. Benefits - Enables more rapid creation and deployment of retail Web sites, allowing 1-800-FLOWERS.COM to try out new offerings with very little investment and risk - Facilitates cross-selling between brands by unifying the underlying technology - Provides the potential for information sharing across business units, opening up the possibility for more effective marketing to customers - Ensures a consistent look and feel across the company - Provides a rich, differentiated customer experience Reduces maintenance and development costs Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project : External Completed project Industry : Case Study Link : Retail Reference Link :
- During the presale period, the IT manager for Lunender tested all of the IBM hardware against Hewlett-Packard/Compaq products. Across the board, the IBM hardware offered not only better performance, availability, security and reliability, but also the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). Moreover, the virtualization features of the IBM machines provide plenty of scalability and enable the client to align its IT systems with its growth needs. http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-79ZSY4&appname=crmd
- Headquartered in Weiden, Germany, Constantia Hueck Folien GmbH & Co. KG develops, manufactures and markets flexible packaging products for the food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries. The company has manufacturing sites in Germany, Belgium and the United States, as well as a worldwide network of sales representatives. The company employs around 900 people. It achieved revenues of €181 million in 2006. Hueck Folien’s production processes are governed by its SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) application, which interfaces with a manufacturing execution system and an e-procurement solution. Customers can place orders directly via electronic data interchange. To ensure that the company’s supply chain, production line and logistics are managed effectively, all three systems must remain online 24x7, which requires a highly reliable IT infrastructure. As Hueck Folien’s business demands grew, its existing support platform began to underperform. Hueck Folien wanted to move to a new platform that would offer greater performance, scalability and resiliency. IBM Premier Business Partner Profi helped Hueck Folien deploy two IBM System p5™ 550 servers to support a new SAP ERP application, which includes financial accounting, controlling, sales and distribution, materials management, production planning, human capital management, product lifecycle management and plant maintenance modules. Hueck Folien installed SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence software, which relies on the servers’ high-performance processors for excellent response times. The company also deployed two IBM System Storage™ N5200 disk systems, which facilitate high availability and system-level redundancy for the business-critical SAP applications. By helping to ensure that Hueck Folien’s SAP applications and other systems will remain available 24x7, the IBM infrastructure helps reduce risk for the business and helps facilitate the preservation of profit margins. In addition, the new solution offers considerable scalability and resiliency.
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-7FGLNR&appname=crmd Located just north of Düsseldorf, Germany in North Rhine-Westphalia, Krefeld is home to 240,000 citizens. SWK Stadtwerke Krefeld AG (SWK) is the communal utility company for Krefeld, providing energy, water, natural gas, district heating, public transportation and waste management to the community. A long IBM and SAP shop, SWK’s IT department provides services for SWK, subsidiary companies and external clients. In the face new European Union (EU) regulations for utilities requiring separate IT environments for billing and general business processes, the company needed a new IT infrastructure that would increase the total IT workload. In addition, SWK wanted to modernize its SAP systems with project management and human resources applications, the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component, the SAP for Utilities solution portfolio and the SAP Waste and Recycling application. With the help of IBM Business Partner Comparex, SWK chose to implement two IBM System p5™ 590 servers with upwards of 18 logical partitions (LPARs) each. Half of the LPARs are dedicated to SAP production applications and the other half support shorter term projects, testing and quality assurance. To facilitate high availability, SWK operates two data centers, each with a System p5 server and an IBM System Storage™ DS8000 disk system for backup, archive and restore functionality. An IBM DB2® data server supports the SAP applications, and with the data server’s deep compression capabilities, SWK dramatically reduced the size of its SAP database. IBM Global Financing provided an attractive financing package for SWK that helped it keep within its relatively tight budget. The new infrastructure has enabled SWK to address the EU IT requirements for utilities, but the organization believes that the lasting value of the implementation is its ability to incorporate new workloads by introducing suitable resourced LPARs for each application from the existing processor capacity. With the deep compression capabilities of the DB2 data server, SWK has reduced the size of its SAP Business Intelligence database by 65 percent and its SAP ERP database by 45 percent. For all DB2 operations, database performance has increased by five percent. With the new SAP applications running on the IBM infrastructure, SWK has significantly improved customer satisfaction levels and enhanced the cost-efficiency and flexibility of its IT services.
- Headquartered in Eschborn, Germany, Techem provides utilities meter-reading and billing services for 611,00 customers in 6.7 million households across Europe. Techem was planning to upgrade its SAP ERP application. The enterprise resource planning system upgrade would require a 400 percent increase in processing resources, which meant that the company needed to expand the capacity and performance of its existing IBM System p ™ servers. At the same time, Techem made the decision to migrate from the IBM AIX ® operating system to Linux ® to obtain a more stable, flexible and scalable environment. It also wanted to take advantage of virtualization and storage area networks (SANs) to improve system performance while reducing costs. With the help of IBM Business Partner SVA, Techem upgraded its existing System p servers from four to eight CPUs and added another server with eight CPUs. Partitioned to run both the IBM AIX 5L V5.3 operating system and the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server V9 operating system, the servers support SAP ECC 5.0 and SAP CRM 4.0 software, along with an Oracle database. This new platform has enabled Techem to deploy 31,200 new SAP licenses. To ensure high availability and optimize resource utilization, the servers are clustered using IBM Tivoli ® System Automation software, Dynamic Logical Partitions (DLPARs), Micro-Partitioning, Partition Load Manager and Virtual I/O features. SVA also helped install a SAN based on IBM System Storage SAN Switches and DS4300 disk systems, bringing the storage capacity levels high enough to support the heavier workloads. Techem also adopted IBM System Storage ™ SAN Volume Controller software to virtualize its storage capacity. For centralized data backups, Techem deployed IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software. After working with SVA to implement the solution, Techem engaged IBM Global Technology Services to provide software maintenance and recovery services. The IBM infrastructure offers the performance, stability and capacity needed to support the upgraded SAP environment and can scale to support future growth. Techem benefits from the IBM System p5 ™ 570 servers’ 64-bit IBM POWER ™ processors and virtualization technology, which enable the company to run two operating systems on the same machine. And by implementing the SAN-based storage system, the company now has a large, centralized storage environment capable of scaling to meet future increases in SAP ERP workloads and storage demands. In addition, the Tivoli Storage Manager software provides a reliable, easy-to-use tool to automate backups of the critical SAP ERP data.
- Peking University People’s Hospital Providing better, smarter healthcare with electronic, remote monitoring The need: PKUPH has participated in a community healthcare management system launched by the Beijing Xicheng District Healthcare Bureau in 2008. While the program, powered by IBM’s HBI (Healthcare Business Integration) information platform, enables cooperation and resource sharing among medical service providers, its reach is restricted solely to the Xicheng District, or the western part of Beijing. As a leading university hospital with top-caliber medical expertise, PKUPH is ambitious to serve a wider population and broader area. To meet its expansion objectives, PKUPH will need to connect to more community hospitals and healthcare centers in other districts of Beijing and potentially other cities of China. To that end, PKUPH knew it had to build electronic records of patients and a medical record system that could be shared with other healthcare providers to facilitate the integration of medical resources and the process of patient referral. In addition, PKUPH plans to provide more responsive, proactive care to patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. While it is not easy to cure chronic diseases, the hospital hopes to improve the patients’ general well-being and reduce or prevent acute attacks. The solution: PKUPH is moving forward with a first of a kind (FOAK) project that aims to enhance the quality and efficiency of medical services. Supported by IBM Research, China, and leveraging the proven technology of IBM DB2, FileNet BPM, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Portal Server and EMPI, IBM Global Business Services is helping PKUPH implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for managing patients’ electronic health records. The platform and its integrated procedures will enable the interconnectivity and interoperability of patients’ health records among partnering healthcare providers throughout treatment cycles. All the medical files will follow local and international standards, such as HL7 RIM, CDA R2 and IHE XDS, to ensure seamless exchange of data in the future. The spirit of evidence-based patient-centered collaborative care is also being instilled into the management of chronic diseases. Clinical guidelines regarding use of medicine, potential risks and so on are encoded as part of the industry-standard process to enhance clinical decision support. In order to allow PKUPH to provide timely diagnosis and treatment to patients with chronic diseases, the CRL is implementing IBM’s advanced clinical process management technology, building into the platform telemedicine functionality that leverages mobile telecommunications and real-time messaging alert services. In the future, vital signs of patients such as blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar level will be constantly monitored by mobile devices at their homes and fed into the system immediately. Any occurrence of irregularity will automatically trigger an instant alert notification to PKUPH for prompt response. What makes it smarter: - Currently, patients’ medical records are scattered across various hospitals, community clinics and township healthcare centers, and even in different systems within one organization. The solution’s functionality will create longitudinal electronic health records of patients, allowing personalized health assessment and treatment for patients based on their individual medical circumstances. Starting from early 2011, the new service will be rolled out at selected hospitals and community clinics. - PKUPH will target diabetic patients as the first batch of participants in the chronic disease management program. The system is a viable preventive measure in stemming acute attacks as it will monitor whether a patient is following his treatment plan or returning for outpatient visits regularly. It is also very responsive. Patients’ blood sugar, blood pressure and heart rate data will be stored and analyzed. When changes in these vital signs happen for a sustained, pre-determined period of time, the system will automatically generate an alert to the patient and his medical specialists to enable immediate actions. With continued monitoring and real-time alert capability, the solution will help mitigate the development of the patients’ conditions, reduce acute attacks, and improve their quality of life. Instrumented: To enable exchange of medical data, the health record platform is equipped with file adaptors, such as CDA (Clinical Data Architecture) adaptor, which can convert disorganized files into standardized, interoperable formats. In addition, a mobile widget will be made available to patients with chronic medical conditions. When a diabetic patient, for example, uses blood pressure and blood sugar test kits at home, the data will be sent out from the widget and fed into PKUPH’s centralized platform. Interconnected: Through the project, PKUPH aims to consolidate 7-8 internal systems as well as connect more closely with other medical service providers. The system will enable all the participating institutions to share and exchange medical data smoothly. Intelligent: By embedding evidence-based medicine capability into the chronic disease control mechanism, the solution will benefit doctors and patients. Diagnosis and treatment will become more efficient, and mistakes will be minimized, assisted by automatically-generated suggestions and warnings on medical procedures and prescriptions based on patients’ health records and symptoms. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Ongoing project Industry : Healthcare
- http://w3-01.ibm.com/sales/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=CR&subtype=NA&htmlfid=0GLOS-838RR6&appname=crmd Business challenge The company needed to introduce double-entry bookkeeping within three years, making a rapid implementation critical. Its objectives were: Launch double-entry bookkeeping in accordance with the latest statutory requirements Set up a future-safe, flexible IT platform for hosting SAP applications Establish Linux as a strategic operating system platform Ensure fail-safe operation of the SAP production systems that it hosts Consolidate an existing SAP system for facilities management onto the new platform Integrate the new landscape into the existing systems management environment, especially for backup/restore and monitoring purposes. Solution Four years ago, IBM Global Services - Global Business Services began assisting the city administration with the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping by implementing standard SAP ERP software, along with a preconfigured SAP template. As the general contractor, IBM was in charge of project management and project launch. Datenzentrale Baden-Württemberg (DZ BW) was involved in implementing the double-entry bookkeeping solution as a partner and subcontractor. IBM Global Technology Services - Integrated Technology Services provided the design and implementation of the infrastructure, SAP Basis and associated middleware. IBM Business Partner SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH supplied a flexible and scalable consolidation platform for the application landscape that included two IBM Power 570 platforms and IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller technology. Once the hardware was supplied, IBM Global Technology Services and the IBM Enterprise Linux Services (ELS) team assisted the company with the finer details of the complex implementation and assumed partial responsibility for implementing the basic technical system. A modern storage area network (SAN) infrastructure was established as the first step. The next involved installing the SAP systems and high-availability clusters, with Linux as the operating system. The requirements for the new system environment were first specified in architecture workshops. The system design was then undertaken and the LPAR layout was defined. In the process, a number of availability requirements for the environment led to changes in the distribution of logical systems or virtual machines from the original plans. Due to the very high flexibility of the IBM PowerVM virtualization technology and the I/O subsystem used, this did not have a negative influence on the original system design and hardware configuration. To achieve the high SAP application availability required, the IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms cluster solution was implemented. The product is partly characterized by a very powerful, rule-based configuration mechanism that permits simple and flexible mapping of dependencies and groupings of cluster resources. This makes it easier to automate complex application landscapes such as the SAP environment. Benefits This database consolidation and virtualization has achieved the maximum possible system capacity utilization. Thanks to Capacity on Demand (CoD) and virtualization in the SAN area, a flexible response to additional resource requirements is possible without hardware expansion. As the application servers continue to be run on upstream Citrix terminal servers using IBM BladeCenter servers running Microsoft Windows operating system, there has been no change to the user experience. The new solution also helped the company: Enjoy the benefits of the easy integration of IBM Power platforms and an open SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system in terms of performance, hardware stability and scalability, as well as the flexibility delivered by PowerVM virtualization technology Achieve synergies by running SAP and non-SAP applications on the same hardware, thereby reducing energy requirements by retiring old physical servers, improving overall capacity utilization and dynamic load-sharing by means of workload consolidation and PowerVM resource sharing, and saving on IT peripherals through I/O virtualization in the server and hard disk area Enable a swifter response to changing customer requirements, making it easier to adapt to user and application growth, and enabling rapid activation of new SAP instances.
- For more information on this Linux on Power reference contact Karin L Amundson/Rochester/IBM
- Headquartered in Eschborn, Germany, Techem provides utilities meter-reading and billing services for 611,00 customers in 6.7 million households across Europe. Techem was planning to upgrade its SAP ERP application. The enterprise resource planning system upgrade would require a 400 percent increase in processing resources, which meant that the company needed to expand the capacity and performance of its existing IBM System p ™ servers. At the same time, Techem made the decision to migrate from the IBM AIX ® operating system to Linux ® to obtain a more stable, flexible and scalable environment. It also wanted to take advantage of virtualization and storage area networks (SANs) to improve system performance while reducing costs. With the help of IBM Business Partner SVA, Techem upgraded its existing System p servers from four to eight CPUs and added another server with eight CPUs. Partitioned to run both the IBM AIX 5L V5.3 operating system and the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server V9 operating system, the servers support SAP ECC 5.0 and SAP CRM 4.0 software, along with an Oracle database. This new platform has enabled Techem to deploy 31,200 new SAP licenses. To ensure high availability and optimize resource utilization, the servers are clustered using IBM Tivoli ® System Automation software, Dynamic Logical Partitions (DLPARs), Micro-Partitioning, Partition Load Manager and Virtual I/O features. SVA also helped install a SAN based on IBM System Storage SAN Switches and DS4300 disk systems, bringing the storage capacity levels high enough to support the heavier workloads. Techem also adopted IBM System Storage ™ SAN Volume Controller software to virtualize its storage capacity. For centralized data backups, Techem deployed IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software. After working with SVA to implement the solution, Techem engaged IBM Global Technology Services to provide software maintenance and recovery services. The IBM infrastructure offers the performance, stability and capacity needed to support the upgraded SAP environment and can scale to support future growth. Techem benefits from the IBM System p5 ™ 570 servers’ 64-bit IBM POWER ™ processors and virtualization technology, which enable the company to run two operating systems on the same machine. And by implementing the SAN-based storage system, the company now has a large, centralized storage environment capable of scaling to meet future increases in SAP ERP workloads and storage demands. In addition, the Tivoli Storage Manager software provides a reliable, easy-to-use tool to automate backups of the critical SAP ERP data.
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- Started in San Francisco in 1999, the company made almost no money that first year but grossed US$1.6 million the second year —an indication of the growth that was to come. A commitment to providing an unprecedented level of customer service that includes free shipping both ways and a 365-day return policy has put Zappos.com on track to earn US$1 billion in gross merchandise sales during 2008. Zappos.com’s early years were spent in a small house in San Francisco above a restaurant. At the time, the entire IT operation consisted of several off-the-shelf “white boxes”. As the company began to grow, it became increasingly challenged with maintaining around-the-clock availability and providing a speedy customer experience. So Zappos.com turned to IBM Premier Business Partner, Sycomp, which introduced the company to systems using the IBM POWER™-based architecture. Specifically, the 570 with building blocks so they could add capacity as required to stay a step ahead of customer, and processing demand. So, what’s next? Zappos.com is preparing to take advantage of PowerVM technology with two Power 550s with POWER6 technology. Kris has told us he’s excited to use Live Partition Mobility.
- Client Name: Rotkäppchen-Mumm Sektkellereien Subtitle: Enhances business analytics and forecasting German winemaker Rotkäppchen-Mumm Sektkellereien, whose name refers to the little red riding cap logo on the company’s main sparkling wine brand, was founded in 1856 in Freyburg, Germany. Today, the company’s 528 employees produce wine, spirits and a variety of other drinks under brands such as Geldermann, Rotkäppchen, Mumm, Jules Mumm, MM Extra, Kloss and Foerster, Chantré, Mariacron, Echter Nordhäuser and Eckes Edelkirsch. In 2009, the company reached record earnings of €778 million, up from €740 million the preceding year. Rotkäppchen is the market leader in sparkling wine in Germany, controlling more than 43 percent of the market. The Need: The company acquired Eckes Spirituosen & Wein in December 2006. Initially, the two operations ran side by side, but the parent company wanted to fully integrate the data, systems and processes of Eckes into the Rotkäppchen SAP ERP infrastructure to reduce costs and increase efficiency across the business. To support the increased number of users and the larger volume of data in the SAP environment, Rotkäppchen needed to refresh its hardware infrastructure. At the same time, the company wanted to enhance business intelligence to improve the accuracy of forecasting and production planning. The Solution: Working with IBM Global Technology Services, the company upgraded its IBM i environment, running production instances of SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on an IBM Power Systems i550. The company uses an IBM Power 520 Express solution to run its SAP test, development and quality assurance instances as well as its SAP Solution Manager. An IBM System Storage TS3100 tape library is used for backups. To improve business intelligence, the company selected IBM Cognos software. Accessed via desktop client applications running in a Microsoft Windows environment, the Cognos software facilitates sales volume planning, rolling three-month volume forecasting and annual customer profitability planning. Account managers can enter sales estimates into the Cognos tools, making adjustments on a month-to-month basis. This rolling forecast feeds into the production planning solutions. As a result, managers can balance the company’s stock positions, actual and predicted sales, and marketing promotions to optimize efficiency. Business results are fed continuously back into the sales forecasting tool for the next monthly rolling forecast. What Makes it Smarter: Intelligent: Business results are continuously fed back into the sales forecasting tool for the next monthly rolling forecast, generating a positive feedback cycle to optimize business performance. Instrumented: Sales estimates are captured into IBM Cognos tools from point-of-sale devices, barcode scanners and market research from external vendors, such as A.C. Nielsen. Interconnected: The solution extracts data to create forecasts, distributes data to production sites and makes data available to business intelligence and data warehousing applications. Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project : External Win/Ongoing project/Completed project Industry : Food and beverage
- APPROVAL: 9/9/09 Per client, this slide is approved for use in customer/prospective customer decks but may not be used in any press releases. Elie Tahari Ltd. New Intelligence BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Clothing retailer Elie Tahari has come to define modern sophistication with collections of understated grace and elegance. It is a privately held corporation with a global presence in more than 40 countries and with more than 600 stores in the United States. Elie Tahari had its order, sales, inventory and financial data spread across the company, making it difficult for managers to access the information needed to make critical business decisions quickly. Managers couldn't identify which products were in the greatest demand, resulting in the company overstocking its warehouses with less-popular items, while the hottest items remained on back order. SOLUTION: Elie Tahari needed to move from ad hoc query/OLAP to scorecards, dashboards, enhanced visualization, and predictive modeling to enable users to mine and access data on their own while maintaining standards, quality and consistency. To do so, the following solution components were implemented: IBM Cognos 8 IBM System i IBM Cognos Framework Manager To enable effective operations decisions, increased growth, constrained costs and improved profits, Elie Tahari needed to provide employees timely access to trusted information across the enterprise. Previously on a reporting platform known as "InSeam" and a Sky Web-based BI solution, Elie Tahari deployed a near real-time enterprise BI solution – “Tahari Real Time Environment for Data” (TREND) – as its framework for combining business objectives, organizational requirements and technology infrastructure. Elie Tahari created an Operational Data Store (ODS), a staging area for all the data from all its systems in one central place. The data warehouse is then loaded from that staging area. The BI tool reads the data from the data warehouse and presents it to the user in form of reports and or graphs. BENEFITS Improves visibility into business activity, enabling deeper insight into customer needs, targeting of new customers and better inventory forecasting Provides real-time access to business-critical information, driving faster responses to marketplace demands and business challenges Helps achieve a significant competitive advantage in the industry, boosted sales, and cut operational costs Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Completed project Industry : Retail
- Jo L. Kilander Territory Sales Rep - ND USA Phone: 1-701-280-9808 Fax: 1-701-280-9815 Tie Line: 569-9808 Jo Kilander /Fargo/IBM@IBMUS [email_address] Border States Electric IBM clients or prospective clients: Please contact your IBM representative for more details about this reference. IBM presenters: For more information, refer to appropriate contacts in the IBM client reference database at http://w3-3.ibm.com/sales/ssi/crmd.html IBM Business Partner presenters: Add your company's references or search for references in the PartnerWorld client reference database at http://partners.boulder.ibm.com/src/partnerrefs.nsf/HomePage?OpenForm ] Find the complete reference here: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/STRD-7KUMV2?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us For more information on Border States Electric: https://www.borderstateselectric.com/wps/portal For more information on the IBM SAP Alliance: http://w3-03.ibm.com/sales/support/information/sap/index.html IBM Power Systems story for Border States Electric: Industry: Wholesale distribution Applications: SAP R/3 4.7, SAP NetWeaver Portal Hardware: IBM Power Systems servers (System i 550 and i570); System x servers and BladeCenter HS20 and HS21 with Intel Xeon processors, IBM System Storage DS8100, Lenovo desktops and laptops Software: IBM i5/OS, IBM DB2 for i5/OS, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Enterprise Content Manager, IBM WebSphere Portal, SUSE Linux, VMware ESX Server Services: IBM Global Business Services, SAP Consulting Border States Electric (BSE) provides a wide range of products and services for the construction, utilities, data communications and industrial sectors. It stocks more than $120 million of inventory and has extensive capabilities in terms of logistics and supply chain management services. Headquartered in Fargo, North Dakota, the company has 51 locations across the USA and Mexico, and employs 1,200+ people. Working with IBM Global Business Services and SAP Consulting, Border States Electric implemented ERP applications from SAP on the IBM Power Systems platform with IBM i, later adding IBM System x and IBM BladeCenter platforms. The solution is integrated with numerous third-party applications and the company’s IBM WebSphere Portal implementation. Sales have increased by 300 percent and profits 500 percent since initial SAP R/3 implementation in 1998, helping to deliver a full return on investment. Improved accounting processes and hardware infrastructure accelerate month-end reporting by 95 percent. Enhancement of EDI means over 60 percent of vendor invoices can be processed automatically. Reliable IBM Power Systems servers deliver near-100 percent uptime. Customer quotes: “ The combination of the powerful virtualization features, the unbeatable reliability and the fact that DB2 is fully integrated with the operating system makes IBM Power Systems with IBM i the perfect choice for our SAP application landscape.” “ The interoperability between IBM WebSphere Portal, which is our main corporate portal, and SAP NetWeaver Portal, which enables customers to interact directly with the ERP applications, is really seamless.” “ Many companies regard expenditure on technology as a black hole, but technology from SAP and IBM has helped us prove that it can be quite the opposite.” Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for this flagship reference: Machine Efficiency: month-end financial reports are available on the next day; this used to take 15-20 days (=93% to 95% faster); Customer Satisfaction: quicker delivery – over 60% of invoices are now processed by EDI, which means quicker transactions and quicker delivery; reduced down time – nearly 100% uptime with System i more revenue – sales increased 300% since 1998 (first SAP implementation), and profits 500%; better return on investment – 37% per year, so total RoI in 2.5 years, TCO savings - $30m over 9 years
- Alpha Bank Group has more than 600 branches in Greece and across southeastern Europe, with offices in New York, London and the Channel Islands. Its London operations, Alpha Bank London, employ around 75 people in a number of different business units offering banking and investment products. Aiming to make its IT architecture more efficient and manageable, Alpha Bank London decided to consolidate the systems of its U.K.-based subsidiaries in its London data center. Alpha Bank London also planned to upgrade its banking software to Financial Objects ibis s2 software. For both objectives, the bank needed a reliable, security-rich platform that could support time-sensitive financial transactions and live up to stringent high availability standards. Alpha Bank London implemented a new hardware infrastructure based on an IBM System i® 520 platform, choosing it in part because of the security and flexibility of its architecture. The bank was able to install separate instances of the new Financial Objects application on the System i platform using its logical partition (LPAR) capabilities and virtualization technology. Meanwhile, IBM BladeCenter® HC10 servers run the front-end application and SQL databases. Alpha Bank London uses IBM InfoSphere™ Change Data Capture software to integrate the databases and IBM iCluster® for i software to help ensure high availability. The response to the new solution has been overwhelmingly positive, from both IT staff and users. The new application, combined with the performance of the new System i platform, has dramatically reduced transaction processing time. And IT administrators now have fewer machines to manage, which means they spend less time and money on maintenance. Plus, the IBM technology provides the high availability, business resilience and enhanced security that the bank requires.
- BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Not long ago, customers – both individual and companies – were delighted with the fast delivery services provided by air transport. They would choose ground transportation when the delivery didn’t need a definite arrival time. Today, customers are asking for the kind of time-definite deliveries for ground transportation that used to be exclusively for air transport So over the years, competition between carriers intensified and carriers had to transform their key processes – like package tracking for example – to meet the escalating expectations of customers. FedEx Ground – a major competitor in this industry – needed to ensure that its business systems were fast, reliable and flexible—and could meet the continuing, escalating processing demands. FedEx believes that constant improvement in delivery performance is a “must” both for its bottom line and those of its customers and they are striving to reach a “zero-defect” environment. SOLUTION: So, to achieve that, FedEx turned to IBM. And what did IBM do? They recommended IBM System I as the foundation for FedEx Ground operations for now and in the future The result has been a steady improvement in efficiency with packages moving through the system faster – and, FedEx Ground has been able to add a richer array of services for its customers. One of the things FedEx Ground is doing – a) because it now can and b) to differentiate by from its competitors – is the introduction of scheduled home delivery packages. It used to be that the package would arrive some time during the day – now, a customer is able to schedule when they want the package delivered. This new ability rests on the shoulders of ever-increasing data gathering – once gathered, it’s integrated into FedEx’s information backbone, automated sortation systems to make the millions of calculations needed to optimize package flow across their network. Think of it, for each of the nearly 3million packages picked up on an average day, the system is able to plot a specific path based on the data that was gathered. BENEFITS: Ken Spangler, the VP of IT at FedEX Ground, says that over the last few years, their composite service and quality performance has improved by more than 70% thanks in part to the processing speed, architecture scalability and system availability of the System i. He says that from a competitive standpoint, “we have become a better company every year.” The System I has enabled them to grow the scale of their environment while at the same time, become more nimble and resilient. -- That’s a great combination
- IBM clients or prospective clients: Please contact your IBM representative for more details about this reference. IBM presenters: For more information, refer to appropriate contacts in the IBM client reference database at http://w3-3.ibm.com/sales/ssi/crmd.html . IBM Business Partner presenters: Add your company's references or search for references in the PartnerWorld client reference database at http://partners.boulder.ibm.com/src/partnerrefs.nsf/HomePage?OpenForm ] Groupe Mutuel Putting a premium on business flexibility by redesigning core processes Business Challenge: Based in Martigny, Switzerland, Groupe Mutuel provides a wide range of insurance services to more than one million customers. The approach that deeply defines Groupe Mutuel’s business model is the company’s effort to cultivate and maintain the strengths, character and identity of each of its 14 operating units within their respective locales. By maintaining a local presence — in terms of brand, customer service and other differentiating factors — Groupe Mutuel aims to preserve within each unit the qualities that made it successful to begin with. For this business model to work, however, Groupe Mutuel realized it needed to create a common set of optimized processes at the core of its operations, which would give the company the flexibility and efficiency it needed to win in the dynamic Swiss market. Solution: Groupe Mutuel turned to IBM Global Business Services (GBS) for assistance in designing its new process environment and for the flexible technology infrastructure needed to support it. GBS led Groupe Mutuel’s corps of internal business process experts and analysts through the IBM Component Business Modeling (CBM) methodology. The CBM methodology enabled Groupe Mutuel to gain a deep and fundemental view of how the company’s processes needed to work to enable maximum efficiency and competitive differentiation. Using the CBM as a roadmap, GBS helped Groupe Mutuel redesign and rebuild its core infrastructure with SOA capabilities, principally the ability to create a layer of abstracted services that can be easily redeployed in any of the company’s operations with little to no integration effort. The main enabler of this capability is IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, which simplifies connectivity between Groupe Mutuel’s backend systems. At the hardware level, Groupe Mutuel consolidated a large number of its existing servers with IBM BladeCenter HS20 blade servers and a pair of IBM System p5 595 servers. The company’s older applications run on two IBM System i 595 servers, while storage is handled by IBM TotalStorage 3500 Tape Library devices. With the infrastructure foundation in place, GBS turned to the process side, providing Groupe Mutuel with guidance on business process transformation strategies that drew heavily from best practices from other IBM insurance engagements around the world. IBM is leading a series of change management seminars and workshops to propagate the benefit of process change more broadly to employees. The most important benefit of Groupe Mutuel’s work with IBM is that it makes a good business model even better. While Groupe Mutuel can continue to leverage the local market strengths of its individual units, the fact that it can do so on a foundation of flexible, standardized and lower-cost processes makes it a more nimble and efficient competitor. Benefits: Reduction in operational costs through the standardization of backend processes • Reduction in the time and cost of integrating new acquisitions via SOA-based integration • Increase in customer satisfaction and retention through reduction in reenrollment and claims cycle time • Reduction in time to market with new insurance products • Reduction in time required to comply with changing regulations • Improvements in the cross-selling and proactive customer management capabilities through a portfolio view of the customer Transformation at a glance: Groupe Mutuel fully capitalized on the changing market landscape through a series of successful acquisitions. By enabling the optimization of core processes across the entire business—while maintaining each business unit’s unique market identity—Groupe Mutuel’s new SOA enables the company’s operational efficiency to catch up with its rapid growth . Usage level : Win/Ongoing project/Completed project: External Complete Industry: Insurance
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- IIC-INTERSPORT International Corporation is the purchasing and management company of the INTERSPORT-Group. With its retail turnover of €8.37 billion and more than 4,900 associated retailers in 32 countries, INTERSPORT-Group has the worldwide leading position in the sporting goods retail marketplace. INTERSPORT Deutschland eG (INTERSPORT), part of the worldwide INTERSPORT International Corporation, is the cooperative for more than 1,500 sport outfitters in Germany. INTERSPORT wanted to extend and upgrade its SAP application landscape and needed a new infrastructure that would provide the capacity for growth in its business intelligence environment. INTERSPORT also required a high-availability platform that would keep its SAP systems online 24x7. In late 2005, INTERSPORT requested a proposal from IBM to renew the hardware for its SAP Business Warehouse (BW) environment because the current environment was no longer able to support the required workload with satisfactory performance. IBM took part in a comprehensive benchmarking exercise to demonstrate that an IBM System i5™ 570 and IBM System Storage™ DS8100 solution would meet INTERSPORT’s needs. After the exercise, the company worked with IBM Global Technology Services and IBM Business Partner Fritz & Macziol to implement the new infrastructure and upgrade its SAP applications. INTERSPORT replaced the SAP R/3 4.6C system with the SAP ECC 6.0 system, the SAP Customer Resource Management (CRM) 3.1 module with the SAP CRM 5.0 module, and the SAP BW 3.5 application with the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI) 7.0 solution. After implementing the System i5 technology, INTERSPORT has a flexible, highly available, high-performance platform for its SAP solutions. The IBM server also delivers a scalable environment for the SAP business intelligence software. A disaster recovery concept that includes full data redundancy was implemented using two DS8100 storage servers, providing the client with peace of mind.
- Client name: Mineralbrunnen Überkingen-Teinach AG Industry: Consumer Products Profile: A leading producer of mineral water and soft drinks in Germany
- Client name: Hemas Holdings PLC Industries: Consumer products, healthcare, travel & transportation Profile: A diversified conglomerate in Sri Lanka composed of 20 subsidiaries spanning five key industry sectors
- Client name: Ahlers AG Industry: Consumer products Profile: An international fashion conglomerate located in Germany with sales of €260 million annually