Huawei helped Fonterra deploy an efficient financial and supply chain management system based on SAP HANA. The solution delivers easy and speedy real-time payment analysis, efficient account checking and insightful decision making, taking Fonterra to a new level of business agility and productivity.

Fonterra Co-operative Group Limited ("Fonterra" for short), based in Auckland, New Zealand, was established in October 2001 following the merger of the country's two largest dairy co-operatives. It has more than 17,000 employees now and is New Zealand's largest local company. The company exports dairy products accounting for approximately 30% of the world's dairy markets. With sales revenue exceeding USD15.6 billion, Fonterra is the world's largest dairy exporter.

Fonterra's Long-Term Business Evolution Requirements

As a world-leading dairy company, one of Fonterra's core advantages is a holistic, fully-integrated supply chain. In New Zealand, Fonterra owns over 10,000 suppliers, and a transport fleet consisting of more than 400 milk tankers. Around the world, Fonterra has over 80 dairy factories, producing dairy products sold to more than 100 countries. To support such a large number of suppliers and customers, Fonterra has been dependent on the enterprise IT system.

Currently, Fonterra's entire live network services are hosted in the data center owned by Datacom, the largest local ISP. The two companies have been cooperating closely. Fonterra's core production applications are deployed on SAP R3 products and Oracle database, such as the supply chain management (SCM) system, financial system, customer and order management systems. However, this set of IT architecture is under tremendous pressure. On the one hand, the bottom layer of Fonterra's live network is deployed on the traditional Oracle-based database, which has high CAPEX. Moreover, the data processing performance of traditional databases is highly dependent on the external centralized storage, providing limited real-time processing capability, and is highly susceptible to performance bottlenecks. It's increasingly difficult to meet Fonterra's business development requirements. On the other hand, in 2015, SAP has released its next-generation enterprise business suite SAP S/4 HANA completely based on HANA platform. Therefore, when upgrading the SAP-based enterprise applications and purchasing new IT hardware platforms, Fonterra needs to consider the long-term service evolution and SAP product requirements, to ensure that the new enterprise IT system achieves the optimal balance between performance, reliability, CAPEX, and follow-up O&M.

SAP HANA is a high-performance real-time data computing platform launched by SAP based on in-memory computing technologies. In the traditional transactional database architecture, programs do not support real-time business applications for massive data processing. SAP HANA puts the data to be processed in the memory and unleashes the enormous power of real-time service applications. Huawei has worked closely with SAP to not only present the SAP HANA appliance, but also develop a rich array of industry solutions and best practices based on SAP HANA, thereby simplifying the SAP HANA implementation for enterprises and playing an indispensable role to service development assurance.

Advantages of Huawei Solution

Having fully considered Fonterra's existing IT system and future demands, Huawei provides the SAP HANA appliance solution based on Huawei's 5885H V3 4-socket rack server. The Huawei SAP HANA appliance is jointly developed by Huawei and SAP. Its advantages are as follows:

  • Shatters performance bottlenecks:

    SAP S/4HANA is an industry-leading in-memory database platform, which requires high performance of the hardware platform. The 5885H V3 appliance solution is unique in that it uses Huawei's ES3000 PCIe SSD card for SAP HANA database acceleration. The ES3000 boosts the SAP HANA I/O performance by 3x, allowing the SAP HANA to effortlessly address the high-performance requirements.

  • Ancitipates future needs:

    Huawei SAP HANA appliance solution has high availability and flexible scalability, which enables it to easily handle any workload, rapidly respond to changing service environment, and implement agile production for customers, greatly improving the production efficiency.

  • Secures services and data:

    The highly reliable hardware platform and solution-level reliability design of Huawei SAP HANA appliance solution ensure the security of system data and services, minimizing downtime caused by platform faults and optimizing the overall system performance.

  • Drives down CAPEX:

    Huawei 5885H V3 server is based on the x86 architecture, which is designed and manufactured with the industry standard server components, avoiding the high purchase and maintenance costs that would arise with enclosed-architecture UNIX servers.

In addition, Huawei has extensive experience in SAP HANA's system deployment and maintenance. Teaming up with SAP and Datacom New Zealand, Huawei helps Fonterra build a best-in-class computing platform backed by an optimal service platform and service ecosystem.

The superb performance of SAP HANA appliance, as well as the synergy of the partners, has proved the Huawei SAP HANA appliance the choicest solution for Fonterra.

Driving Greater Value for the Customer

Huawei and SAP have teamed up with Datacom New Zealand to help Fonterra implement a simple-to-use, highly scalable and efficient financial and supply chain management system based on SAP HANA. The solution delivers the easy and speedy real-time payment analysis, efficient account checking and insightful decision making, taking Fonterra to a new level of business agility and productivity.

For example, the three companies work together to complete a Proof of Concept (PoC) test to help Fonterra establish a set of enterprise application benchmarks. They also make full use of the performance and reliability advantages of Huawei products, to construct an optimal solution that meets Fonterra's the current service requirements. In addition, the solution supports Fonterra's business optimization in the future, matching its long-term business evolution requirements. After the live network is migrated to the SAP HANA appliance, Fonterra will save USD1 million costs each month as estimated.

After the stringent 3-month PoC test, the system officially went live in Q4 2016. All indicators have perfectly met the customer's requirements. Therefore, Fonterra has decided to continue the cooperation with Huawei and its partners to carry out the Phase-2 system upgrade and reconstruction. "Looking forward, Fonterra is planning to implement another joint solution from Huawei and Datacom that runs on SAP HANA. The new solution will support critical decision making through agile analytics for aggregating dynamic business data from multiple clouds and non-traditional sources," explained Andrew Faid, Technical Lead of SAP Projects, Global Information and Solutions Group, Fonterra.

Huawei helps Fonterra deploy an efficient, SAP HANA-based finance and supply chain management system. The system enables convenient, fast, real-time payment analysis, efficient account query, and business decision support.

This project has helped Huawei receive an Honorable Mention in the Special Award category of the SAP HANA® Innovation Awards 2017 at SAPPHIRE NOW®, the world’s premier business technology event and largest SAP customer-run conference, held in Orlando, USA, May. Huawei was honored with the prestigious award in recognition of its leadership and contribution towards the SAP HANA platform and technology solutions. Looking ahead, Huawei plans to continue investing in innovations for SAP HANA industry-specific solutions, as well as collaborating with the partners, to provide more high-performance solutions for the customers.

Huawei helps Fonterra deploy an efficient, SAP HANA-based finance and supply chain management system. The system enables convenient, fast, real-time payment analysis, efficient account query, and business decision support.

Winning SAP HANA® Innovation Awards 2017 at SAPPHIRE NOW. Left to Right: Alan Nehemia, Huawei Enterprise Channel Director (NZRO); James Wang, Huawei US R&D Principal Architect; John Kirkman, Datacom Senior Architect.

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