IBM Power9 and SAP S/4 Hana

Hoffmann Neopac is a packaging technology specialist from Switzerland. With production sites in five countries and over 1,000 employees worldwide, the family-owned company manufactures cans and tubes for customers in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food sectors.

Frank Werdermann, CIO at Hoffmann Neopac, explains: "Our packaging must be functional and beautiful. And at the same time meet all relevant hygiene regulations. Our claim is to identify consumer trends at an early stage and to work today on the innovations that will perfectly solve our customers' future requirements.

Being able to react quickly and agilely to changes, making good forecasts and unerring logistics planning are crucial for our business success. We wanted to be able to have second-by-second insights into our key figures at any time, so that we could use these insights to optimize our production, reduce waste, save costs and, above all, increase the sustainability of our business."

Hoffmann Neopac has relied on SAP ERP and IBM Power Systems for over 20 years. However, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the company to perform analyses in real time in order to continuously further optimize business processes. After extensive evaluation of several options, the company decided to implement SAP S/4 Hana. In doing so, it deliberately did not choose the path of a migration, but rather built a completely new system "on the greenfield".

Frank Werdermann explains the decision: "Our criteria catalog for the selection included more than 150 questions. In the end, S/4 Hana clearly prevailed as an integrated solution. Looking at our ERP environment, which had grown over decades, a new implementation from scratch seemed faster and easier than migrating the existing systems."

In the course of these considerations, Hoffmann Neopac also outsourced the complete operation of the SAP landscape to the IBM Gold Business Partner Wagner. The new solution was implemented directly in the Wagner Power Cloud on IBM Power Systems servers with IBM FlashSystem storage in data centers in Switzerland. For Hoffmann Neopac, the infrastructure itself also played a role in the decision.

CIO Werdermann describes the selection process: "We looked at various offers with different technologies. The fact that Wagner's solution relies on IBM technology was an important factor for us. After all, we know the IBM Power Systems platform very well from our own data center operations and know how reliable and performant the solution is."

The Wagner Power Cloud provides Hoffmann Neopac with IBM Power System-
E950 and Power System S922 servers are used. The systems are completely virtualized with IBM PowerVM, S/4 and Hana run on Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.

Frank Werdermann illustrates the advantages of this platform: "The total cost of ownership of SAP S/4 Hana on IBM Power Systems is significantly lower than on the x86 architecture. We need 40 IBM Power9 processor cores for operation; on other platforms we would utilize 540 processor cores. That's 90 percent less hardware infrastructure, which also has a positive impact on software licensing costs. We did the math, and the IBM infrastructure consumes about 15 times less energy than other architectures to boot."

Real-time computing

All business-critical data is stored redundantly on two IBM FlashSystem 900s, which are also virtualized via IBM Spectrum Virtualize. The solution's high data throughput and low latency enable access to business data without delay, creating the basis for real-time analyses. The combination of Power Systems and FlashSystem can show its strengths to the full, for example, when restarting Hana systems. While this can take up to ten minutes with simple hard disks, a Hana restart with flash storage takes only 30 seconds.

The service contract with Wagner also covers flexible parallel operation of SAP ERP and S/4. Frank Werdermann clarifies: "We are a packaging manufacturer, not an IT company. For medium-sized companies, the personnel costs for the basic operation of an SAP landscape with the necessary expert knowledge are simply too high.

By working with Wagner, our IT team can focus on the application or business side and thus create real added value. Thanks to the flexible agreement with Wagner, we benefit from the expertise of specialists who do nothing but run systems for customers like us all day long. This approach helps us to jointly drive the transformation from SAP ERP to S/4 step by step and to replace more and more existing systems."

With IBM's infrastructure and Wagner's service, Hoffmann Neopac has 99.9 percent availability guaranteed in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and guaranteed response times of less than 350 milliseconds across all production sites in five countries and ten time zones. In fact, however, the existing SAP ERP applications are even faster, with response times of 100 milliseconds for 90 percent of all requests.

Next step: S/4

In the past, it was difficult for Hoffmann Neopac to maintain specialized knowledge and IT specialists for reliable 24-hour operation. With the complete service from partner Wagner, this is no longer an issue. The collaboration lowers the total cost of ownership and relieves the internal IT team.

Frank Werdermann concludes: "With S/4 Hana on Power Systems, we analyze all our data in real time, allowing us to measure our metrics faster and more accurately. By moving to S/4, we will also be able to identify consumer trends more quickly. With this knowledge, we can respond faster to the market and new regulatory requirements. The bottom line is that we can base our strategic planning on a better database and thus make smarter decisions."