Huawei Helps COFCO Coca-Cola Build an Enterprise Private Cloud Platform

You probably didn’t know that, in China, when you drink Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta, or any drink produced by COFCO Coca-Cola Beverages Ltd., a joint venture of China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) and Coca-Cola, Huawei’s ICT is standing behind their production, sales, and distribution.

Network Infrastructure Urgently Needed to Be Consolidated

In 2000, COFCO and Coca-Cola, two of the world’s Top 500 companies, set up COFCO Coca-Cola Beverage Co., Ltd. (“COFCO Coca-Cola”), in which COFCO is holding a 65 percent of the shares while Coca-Cola owns the remaining 35 percent. COFCO Coca-Cola is the only Coca-Cola bottling group controlled by a Chinese-funded enterprise in China. As one of the fastest growing Coca-Cola bottling companies, COFCO Coca-Cola has risen to and secured its position in the list of Top 10 Coca-Cola bottling companies worldwide. Currently, drinks produced by COFCO Coca-Cola are available in 81 percent of China’s territories and to 51 percent of China’s population.

COFCO Coca-Cola’s business systems consist of the following three parts:

Front-end application systems, including sales data, logistics, Office Automation (OA), and external communication management systems.

These systems support daily beverage sales, retail store visits, logistics, dispatch, and other businesses. After customers place orders, freight drivers use a warehouse application system to easily prioritize orders and work out the most appropriate freight routes. With the system’s built-in mapping and navigation functions, beverages can be quickly and accurately delivered to distributors and retail stores.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

COFCO Coca-Cola uses the SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) SAP ECC, whose core components include financial management, sales management, production planning, material management, plant maintenance, Human Resources (HR) management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). By leveraging front-end application systems, CRM enables a series of activities such as order placing and pricing, partner management, and service management.

Portals, reporting systems, and data warehouses

Although COFCO Coca-Cola’s business systems are state-of-the-art, the legacy network infrastructure was siloed. As a result, a number of core business systems were deployed separately. As business types and their scope continued to grow, it became clear these traditional architectures were not enough. COFCO Coca-Cola faced complex Operations and Maintenance (O&M) and difficult upgrades and scalability, which hindered new service roll-out in response to fast changing service needs. COFCO Coca-Cola urgently needed to consolidate its network infrastructure.

A Hyper-Converged Architecture Helps Build a Private Cloud Platform

In the past, COFCO Coca-Cola used midrange computers. Currently, they have improved their CPU performance, and the latest appliances such as Huawei appliances have a high level of integration by incorporating a computing unit, a storage unit, a network unit, and virtualization software together.

After considering multiple factors such as the CPU performance, integration level, cost-effectiveness, and Return On Investment (ROI) of appliances, COFCO Coca-Cola finally chose Huawei’s FusionCube converged appliance solution. In addition, COFCO Coca-Cola adopted Huawei’s FusionServer server, OceanStor 5500 V3 storage system and FusionSphere cloud operating system.

Huawei’s FusionCube is a hyper-converged infrastructure that provides elastic private cloud platform capabilities. With Huawei’s FusionCube deployed, COFCO Coca-Cola can set up a unified resources pooling platform to efficiently satisfy the needs of business systems including CRM, OA, enterprise mail and other core business systems. Additionally, IT resources are efficiently and elastically deployed.

FusionCube uses an innovative architecture that deeply converges computing, storage, and networking resources. It has pre-integrated a high-performance computing platform, a high-speed switching network, a distributed parallel storage system, and a virtualization cloud software, implementing elastic IT service deployment, expansion, and migration. FusionCube is a key necessity to achieve high cost-effectiveness of data centers.

Huawei’s OceanStor 5500 V3 storage system follows a ‘convergence’ concept and enables multi-controller, active-active SAN and NAS integration. All these designs make COFCO Coca-Cola’s pursuit of a storage system that features higher performance, lower latency, and better elasticity a reality.

Huawei’s FusionSphere is an OpenStack-based cloud operating system designed for customers from a wide range of industries. It offers powerful virtualization and resource pool management functions, rich cloud infrastructure components and tools, and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). FusionSphere helps COFCO Coca-Cola to horizontally consolidate physical and virtual resources in the data center and vertically optimize business platforms.

Business Is Operating Stably and Efficiently

Players in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry need to be responsive to fast business expansion. As a leading FMCG player, COFCO Coca-Cola requires that its business systems and office systems go live quickly, run efficiently, and have a high price-to-performance ratio. Additionally, these systems must be stable, meeting the strict system stability requirements of the manufacturing industry.

Huawei’s FusionCube is characterized by a hyper-converged infrastructure and high level of integration, bringing great benefits to COFCO Coca-Cola. For example, FusionCube shortens the service deployment period by over 60 percent, ensuring rapid new service rollout; FusionCube saves the equipment room space by over 70 percent and reduces the data center management expenses by 30 percent; and FusionCube enables nearly a 10-fold improvement on the performance of key services by optimizing the database read/write performance (read/write time reduced from 4.5 ms to 0.42 ms).

Huawei’s FusionServer helps COFCO Coca-Cola reduce the server response time from 900 ms to 600 ms and decrease the ERP report response time from 4,100 ms to 1,700 ms. Huawei’s FusionSphere not only meets COFCO Coca-Cola’s virtualization deployment needs, but makes cloud computing installations and usage more convenient than ever before.

Since the deployment and go-live of Huawei’s ICT products, COFCO Coca-Cola has reported an over 99.9 percent reliability of its core business systems, with a yearly downtime of less than 8 hours. This impressive result meets the core business systems stability requirements of COFCO Coca-Cola and enables efficient business operations.

Building a private cloud platform is the first step of COFCO Coca-Cola’s digital transformation journey. In the future, COFCO Coca-Cola will further deepen its digital transformation. For example, the company plans to deeply integrate production line equipment with core business systems through sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies while capitalizing on Big Data to achieve predictive maintenance and improve production and sales forecasts.

Li Zhihong from COFCO Coca-Cola’s Information Management Department said: “Our original network infrastructure was unable to support our ICT transformation strategy. After about one year of research, we decided to build an enterprise private cloud platform and use cloud infrastructure to support our core business systems such as ERP and CRM.”

“Many market researches show that Huawei is increasing its share in the appliance, storage, and server markets. I strongly agree that Huawei has strong capabilities in these areas. Huawei has provided us with a series of ICT infrastructure solutions such as FusionCube. These offerings fully meet our business development needs and conform to our ICT transformation strategy. We are looking forward to further cooperation with Huawei in the future,” added Li Zhihong.