Unicode and Hana - Mixed Doubles

The conversion to Unicode and Hana not only reduced the downtime of the IT at Städtische Werke Magdeburg, but also makes the medium-sized energy supplier fit for the future.

With the new SAP landscape, SWM also wants to make greater use of IT disciplines such as Big Data and AI (artificial intelligence) to better serve customers or facilitate the maintenance of energy plants.

The energy supplier's IT partner is IBM business partner SVA System Vertrieb Alexander, which created the conditions for a Hana conversion by migrating the SAP landscape to IBM Power hardware.

"We made a virtue out of necessity and linked the necessary conversion to Unicode with the database migration to Hana"

says Frank Schmidt, Head of Organization and Data Processing at SWM.

"Not only has this reduced IT downtime, but it also creates the basis for us to equip our ERP platform for the challenges of the coming years.

With SVA as a partner and the hardware from IBM, we are relying on experience and expertise that we have trusted for a long time."

SWM is a medium-sized energy supplier serving around 250,000 customers in and around Magdeburg. In addition to electricity, gas, water, wastewater disposal and heating, SWM also offers its customers energy consulting services.

In the future, the use of Big Data and AI-based applications should help the company to better recognize correlations from maintenance to customer care and thus become even more efficient and customer-oriented.

Predictive maintenance projects are also being considered at SWM, not only to manage maintenance cycles intelligently, but also to compensate for the current shortage of skilled workers.

SAP has long been at the heart of SWM's ERP landscape. With the new solution, the energy provider has a powerful in-memory platform that can accelerate business processes: In financial accounting, employees can now create individual reports in less than a second - instead of the previous 20 minutes.

The international standard Unicode is indispensable for current releases of the ERP system. Unicode supports around 100,000 different character sets, whether of Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic origin.

To reduce migration costs, SWM decided to combine this step with the database migration. SWM brought the IT service provider SVA on board for this double project.

"Thanks to the close cooperation with SWM on the one hand and IBM on the other, the migration of the SAP landscape was completed within four months - and in parallel operation of the previous ERP landscape."

says Torsten Gründer, Key Account Manager at SVA System Vertrieb Alexander in Dresden.

"The redesign of the IT back-office environment today creates the possibility for the business departments to answer more complex questions more quickly. The decision for a Linux-based IBM Power architecture with the Hana database system also leads to significant cost savings in the IT infrastructure."

SVA has been an IBM Business Partner for many years and is one of the leading system integrators in Germany. The company employs more than 850 people at 16 locations in Germany.

The IT service provider implemented the SAP Hana infrastructure for SWM on the foundation of a high-availability hardware environment with IBM Power8 E850C. SVA took over all implementation services for server, storage and network infrastructure including operating system installation as well as the complete SAP Hana installation on all systems.

Thanks to the migration, SWM can not only manage its ERP data more efficiently and reduce costs for administration, but also create the conditions for simple and seamless consolidation of future applications.

"Through our business partners, we are able to provide industry-specific solutions tailored to specific requirements"

says Olaf Scamperle, Vice President Global Business Partner Organization, IBM DACH.

"SVA is particularly at home in the German SME sector, where it knows the current challenges faced by customers. Smaller utilities in particular currently need a tailored combination of hardware, software and consulting services that can give them a competitive edge over the big players in the market."