1. SAP AT CO OPERATIVE BULK HANDLING LTD. (CBH)<br />The Company<br />Co-operative Bulk Handling Limited (CBH), Perth, Australia.<br />Company website: http://www.cbh.com.au/<br />Co-operative bulk handling ltd. (CBH) based in Perth, Western Australia, stores, transports and markets more than 10 million tonnes of grain annually, some 40 percent of Australia’s total production. CBH is controlled over by 5700 grower shareholders, and exports around 95 percent of the grain tonnage it produces to more than 20 countries.<br />The Problem/Situation<br />Strategic diversification through corporate acquisitions, development of enhanced services for growers and closer integration with world markets lead to considerable increases in workload for the IT infrastructure. In parallel with these changes, senior management took the opportunity to review business processes, looking in particular for efficiencies and cost savings.<br />With almost 200 grain receival points, twelve administration offices, four ports and 19 million tonnes of total storage capacity, managing the logistics alone is a complex business. The company turned to automation whenever possible to increase efficiency and productivity, to help control staff costs and enhance its ability to respond quickly to customers’ needs.<br />The Solution and Implementation <br />From 1998, CBH has been SAP R/3 applications (on IBM AS/400 servers using DB2) for up to 900 users to run the business, combined with specific grain-handling and administrative systems at multiple sites. Since practically all operations touched SAP applications at some point, the company settled on SAP software as one of the strategic foundations for CBH. The IT team reviewed the total cost of ownership, likely new functionality and workload requirements, and the design of new IT infrastructure with the goal of increasing processing efficiency and response times, laying the foundation for future process improvements, finding way to include and automate workflow processes. The company also wanted to speed up the internal information flow to exploit existing resources more efficiently by removing delays and, by lessening the administrative workload the employees could be released for doing more productive, customer-facing tasks.<br />Attracted by the advanced functionality contained in my SAP ERP software, CBH turned to W.J.Moncrieff, an IBM business partner and to IBM itself, to create and delay an IT infrastructure that would meet the company’s flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency requirement.<br />CBH selected Intel Xeon MP EM64T processor-based IBM eServer xSeries model x366 servers, developing eight systems to run the new SAP applications and associated database. Chips based on the Intel EM64T architecture can run as true 64-bit processors, addressing up to 1 TB of physical memory, and or in 32-bit ‘legacy’ mode, with the usual 4 GB limit of addressable memory. The EM64T architecture allows multiple 32-bit applications each to access up to 4 GB physical memory, delivering significant potential performance improvements.<br />SAP software has been able for some time to address more than 4 GB of memory and the Intel EM64T architecture enables the SAP applications to do so on the Intel platform. CBH currently runs in ‘legacy’ mode, but will be able to switch to 64-bit mode if performance requirements increase.<br />CBH also implemented a new storage area network based around an IBM Total Storage DS4300 storage system. The IBM DS4300 storage system can scale to more than 33 TB physical capacity and provides enterprise scale capabilities at low total costs of ownership, offering economical and scalable storage for growing application needs.<br />Since R/3 was running on AS/400, the initial challenge was to migrate to the Windows environment. With more than 200 existing IBM Intel based servers already in the business, CBH expects to gain considerable cost benefits by standardizing on a single environment for its main line of business applications. The company now runs or plans to run financials, controlling, human resources, payroll, maintenance, procurement, sales and distribution, and project management applications.<br />As the migration to the new my SAP ERP software is completed, the CBH team is looking to exploit the portal services available with SAP Netweaver. Both the IBM x366 servers and DS4300 storage system are ideally suited to this addition of workload, making capacity addition a business –as usual task at cost effective price points. With the my SAP ERP applications, CBH also plans to introduce SAP Netweaver@Business Intelligence, a component of the SAP Netweaver platform. <br />The Benefits<br />The new system improved the processing speeds by about 90%. Transactions that took more than 45 minute to run could be completed in less than 5 minutes offering significant savings in the time and productivity boots for a 900 user base. With my SAP ERP, CBH has the potential to take advantage of automated report generation and delivery, with on-screen acceptance and approval that has embedded workflows. Should a piece of equipment be in a maintenance program and therefore affect production planning, managers can see the status, approve necessary actions and make informed decisions without the delays that would occur if they were reliant on praperwork circulating through the company. The new system also lowered system administration workload and costs and improved the ability to introduce enhanced reporting services to 5700 grain-grower shareholder and international customers.<br />With the CBM personnel portal CBH personnel will be able to self serve their personal details, such as address changes and intranet pages, view payroll data and book holiday periods, accessing the personnel application directly.<br />Sources<br />1, Co-operative Bulk Handling Limited (http://www.cbh.com.au/index.html)<br />2, IBM (http://www-306.ibm.com/)<br />3, Lansa (http://www.lansa.com)<br />