Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Manufacturer Cuts IT Costs 40 Percent, Gains Performance in Move from UNIX to Windows
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
The Remington Arms Company, headquartered in Madison, North Carolina, employs 2,500 people to design, produce, and sell sporting goods.
Business Situation
Remington Arms wanted to reduce the cost and increase the performance of its UNIX-based SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Solution
The company migrated to Microsoft® Windows Server System™ integrated server software for its ERP system.
Benefits
Dialog response time cut 60 percent
Availability at 99.99 percent
Total cost of ownership cut by 40 percent
Product direction instills confidence forfuture / “Windows gives us lower cost and greater flexibility for SAP than we had with UNIX. It’s a real win-win situation in terms of doing more with less.”
Brian Turner, SAP Basis Manager, Remington Arms Company
Sporting goods maker Remington Arms was running its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning software on a UNIX-based system, but management wanted to reduce the solution’s cost. The IT group did that—and boosted performance—with a migration to Microsoft® Windows Server System™ integrated server software. As a result of the migration, Remington has reduced total cost of ownership by approximately 40 percent. Meanwhile, technical performance measures have increased by as much as 60 percent and availability is 99.99 percent. The current 32-bit Windows®-based solution fully supports Remington’s needs—and 64-bit Windows-based computing will enable Remington to continue to scale up when it deems necessary.
Situation
Founded in 1816, Remington Arms is one of the oldest and—with 2004 revenues of U.S.$393 million and sales in more than 55 countries—one of the most successful companies in the United States. Remington designs, produces, and sells guns, ammunition, and other sporting goods for the hunting and shooting sports markets, as well as for military, government, and law enforcement markets.
The company maintains its success by enhancing not only the quality of its products but also the quality of the business operations that make those products possible. In 1995, the company began the installation of the financial, sales and distribution, materials management, and plant maintenance modules of the SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.
It completed the initial installation in 1997 with the deployment of the production-planning module throughout Remington’s manufacturing facilities. SAP R/3 brought unified, consistent processes to Remington, boosting both the speed and the accuracy of business processes.
Remington installedSAP R/3 on four HP 9000 L-Class Series Application Server computers running Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX, a version of the UNIX operating system. One HP 9000 N-Class Server computer functioned as a database server running Informix software.
The database had some 450 gigabytes (GB) of data and was growing at a rate of about 110 GB per year. User dialog response time—that is, the time that it took for a user request to make the roundtrip from desktop to server and back again with the requested information—was approximately 1.3 seconds, depending on the operation. Overall response time was approximately 2.5 seconds. Andthe total number of dialog steps per week at Remington was approximately 1.3 million.
The system hardware, software, and maintenance were originally provided by an application service provider. In 1997, Remington brought the solution in-house and managed it with a staff of three, including one UNIX administrator, one SAP Basis administrator, and an Informix database administrator (DBA). The database administrator worked full-time to keep the database system up and running, and—according to Brian Turner, SAP Basis Manager at Remington Arms—there was plenty to keep the DBA busy.
“There were shared memory issues between the Informix database and the UNIX operating system, to the point where we were restartingthe system at least every month and often every week,” says Turner. “A full restartcould bring the system down for 20 minutes at atime—inconveniencing users throughout thecompany.”
In addition to the reliability and availability of the UNIX-based solution, Remington was concerned about thecost. With the solution’s hardware on a three-year replacement cycle, the company was spending an average of $600,000 per year on server hardware, maintenance, and software licenses. And when a UNIX-based computer was decommissioned, there was little that Remington could do with it because the rest of the company’s operations ran on the Microsoft® Windows® operating system.
“Management asked us if there was a way that we could run SAP more efficiently and cheaper,” recalls Turner. That request kicked off a yearlong process of evaluating alternatives. The company concluded that there wasonly one alternative: moving SAP R/3 toWindows.
Solution
In 2002, as the company’s use of SAP R/3 continued to climb, Remington Arms added two Microsoft Windows 2000 Server–based computers as application servers to the existing UNIX environment after deciding they would be more cost-effective than UNIX was. “That gave us the chance to experience running Windows Server™ in our SAP environment,” says Turner. “It was cheaper to run the Windows-based application servers than to run the UNIX application servers.”
Still, Turner and his colleagues were concerned about migrating the entire environment to the 32-bit Windows operating system when they had been running on 64-bit UNIX. “SAP R/3 is very memory intensive,” says Turner. “We were concerned that, as we moved more of our environment to Windows, we might bump up against the memory limits of 32-bit computing.”
Consultations with its system integrator for the migration project—REALTECH, an international technology company that consults on SAP systems—helped allay that concern asREALTECH shared itsexperience with SAP migrations. Remington began consultations with REALTECH at the end of 2001, decided to migrate to Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, and went live with its new SAP R/3 deployment 18 months later.
Remington and REALTECH implemented the deployment in three phases. The first phase was a proof of concept (POC) with an environment that mirrored the intended production environment. The POC consisted of three migrations of the UNIX system to the Windows environment. The POC convinced Remington that the migration could move forward successfully and provided a solid basis for understanding how long the planning, testing, quality assurance, and production launch would take for the broader deployment.
The second phase included the Remington Application Systems teams along with end-user acceptance testing. This phase included another three test migrations of the system and included all the application and configuration changes that would need to occur before the project could move forward. The third phase consisted of the actual migration of the development, testing, and production environments.
“The phased approach was very important to our success,” says Turner. “It not only gave us the confidence to move forward, but also gave us the knowledge that we needed to implement the migration without inconveniencing our users. When we told management that we needed the system down to implement a phase of the migration, we knew to the hour exactly how much time we needed and what we could accomplish in that time.”
Another key to the migration’s success, according to Turner, was the use of the proof of concept, which included exact replicasof the hardware that Remington intended to use in the production system. The new hardware was isolated from the rest of the enterprise for testing purposes and allowed Remington to understand how processes were going to function. This environment ran in parallel to the existing production environment for the 18-month period of the project and is still used as the “sandbox,” or test, environment.
Remington is running SAP R/3 on Windows 2000 Server and the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 relational database management system, part of Windows Server System. Thecompany has plans to upgrade to the Windows Server 2003 operating system, also part of Windows Server System. The solution serves approximately 600 of the company’s 2,500 employees.
The solution runs in a clustered database environment, with two computers running SQL Server 2000 along with an SAP R/3 central instance in an active/passive cluster on both nodes to optimize reliability and availability. During the migration, the database was consolidated to approximately 275GB and is growing at an annual rate of110 GB. In addition to the two cluster server computers, the solution includes six Windows-based application servers.
Benefits
By migrating its ERP solution from a UNIX platform to the Windows platform, Remington Arms has increased user dialog speeds by 60percent, boosted availability to 99.99 percent, and cut total cost of ownership by 40 percent.
Dialog Response Speed Up 60 Percent
When they began the migration, Turner and his colleagues had some concerns about performance of SAP R/3 on Windows Server System software. They needn’t have been concerned. Their implementation of SAP R/3 running on Windows Server and SQL Server delivers an average dialog response time of 0.5 seconds—up to 60 percent faster than on UNIX. Approximately 1.6 million dialog steps occur weekly, as opposed to the 1.3 million steps of the UNIX environment.
“As our people began to use SAP on Microsoft, they immediately noticed how much quicker it was,” says Turner. “Our initialconcerns about performance were completely resolved.”
System AchievesUp to 99.99 Percent Availability
System availability, minus planned downtime, is now at 99.99 percent. (This level of availability is dependent on many factors outside of the operating system, including other hardware and software technologies, mission-critical operational processes, and professional services.) Whereas UNIX clustering was always problematic for Remington, according to Turner, the Windows-based clustering “has worked flawlessly from day one.”
“When we have issues with our hardware, the Windows-based cluster gets us up and running in seconds compared with the 20 minutes that it would take to bring a UNIX computer back up,” says Turner. “We have fewer issues—and when we do have issues, we can resolve them more quickly and easily. The Windows environment has been a big plus for us in terms of system availability.”
Total Cost of Ownership Cut by 40 Percent
Remington management didn’t want just better performance by moving to Windows. It wanted lower cost, too. It got both. The company estimates that total cost of ownership has been cut by 40 percent, or $240,000 per year, by moving to Windows.
Becauselower-cost Windows-based hardware can serve for four years in Remington’s SAP R/3 environment, compared with just three years for moreexpensive UNIX hardware, the company’s average annual hardware costs have dropped. Having put its first Windows-based computers into production for SAP in 2002, Remingtonis now planning to decommission that hardware. Althoughthe company couldn’t reuse its decommissioned UNIX computers because it doesn’t use any other UNIX-based applications, it can redeploy the Windows-based hardware to support other systems of the company that use Windows-based computers but don’t have the steep hardware requirements of R/3.
Althoughthe solution still relies on a technical staff of three people, Remington is freed from the need to maintain scarce UNIX and Informix expertise and can draw on the much broader pools of Windows and SQL Server expertise. Because the solution is more reliable, those staff members don’t spend their days simply responding to problems. They are freed to work on enhancing the solution to meet new needs.
“Windows gives us lower cost and greater flexibility for SAP than we had with UNIX,” says Turner. “It’s a real win-win situation in terms of doing more with less.”
Product Direction Instills Confidence
Turner says Windows Server System gives Remington all the performance and scalability that it currently needs—but he knows that eventually the company will need more. And he trusts that Windows will be able to deliver that increased functionality when needed. The company already is exploring the possibility of upgrading to the 64-bit computing possible with Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005.
“We like that Microsoft has a clear plan to deliver the resources we need before we need them,” says Turner. “That means we can be confident in our solution not only for the present, but also for years to come.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line ofintegrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: