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When Mannington Mills decided in 2003 to roll out an SAP Enterprise Resource Planning environment on Windows servers, it required a leap of faith. The family-owned New Jersey based flooring manufacturer had committed itself to enhance their system infrastructure to support business growth and SAP technology was the linchpin to deliver that success.
“We knew that to meet our growth goals, we had to completely overhaul our application infrastructure,” says Jim Sloane, Vice President of Information Technology at Mannington Mills. “We knew that SAP running on Windows would give us the ability to scale out with the business along with excellent TCO.”
Ready For Prime Time?
But were industry standard servers up to the task? Specifically, could they provide the availability and reliability required in a business-critical enterprise environment? Mannington Mills had standardized on Dell servers, desktops and notebook computers several years earlier. As they began SAP development work on Dell servers and saw how fast and reliable they performed in that demanding environment, the Mannington Mills technology architects realized that Dell was ready for prime time.
“When we started the implementation, there weren’t many businesses running SAP on Windows. We had some concerns about security, availability and logistics like patch management,” says John Leonowich, Mannington’s Director of Technology Services. “Reliability was just as important to us as low TCO," added Leonowich. "Dell understood our concerns and helped us implement SAP on Windows in a way that made it manageable, available and highly scalable”
A Cost-Effective Alternative
Reliability and low total cost of ownership were key criteria for the SAP platform. Mannington Mills valued the reliability that its IBM AS400 legacy systems were delivering, but wanted to avoid the high initial cost and labor-intensive maintenance requirements of using proprietary technology. They also wanted a platform that could flexibly adapt to evolving business needs.
“Upgrading our legacy systems was becoming expensive, especially with our programmers having to spend a lot of time maintaining all the interfaces,” says Sloane. “By moving to a Dell Windows solution we’ve been able to reduce hardware and administration costs by more than $750,000. In addition, many of our former programmers are now analysts supporting various functional areas within the business, enabling our group to be more responsive.”
Enterprise-level Support
In reaching the decision to deploy SAP on Windows, Mannington Mills worked closely with Dell’s SAP Competency Center, beginning a relationship that has continued to this day. Dell enterprise computing engineers advised Mannington Mills on everything from storage area networks and virtualization to setting up quality and test environments for the SAP implementation.
“Dell helped us develop a disaster-tolerant infrastructure with no single point of failure,” says Leonowich. “For the first time in a Windows server environment, we deployed a totally redundant architecture, including application and database servers, as well as the SAN. At first, we were unfamiliar with, and a bit uncomfortable about using SAN technology, but Dell really helped us understand its benefits and that helped us achieve confidence in its availability and reliability.”
Working closely with Mannington’s IT staff, Dell engineers helped them design an infrastructure that enabled peripheral systems that feed critical data to connect to the SAP environment. Now when customers place orders, real-time shipping status information from FedEx and other vendors is displayed, sales tax is calculated and posted, and information from numerous other sources is retrieved as needed.
New Efficiencies Yield Cost Savings
Mannington Mills’ transactional SAP R3 system has enabled the company to increase efficiency throughout its businesses. New capabilities in tracking warehoused products, for example, have reduced truck loading times at the High Point, NC facility from two hours to just 30 minutes, and enable inventory to be turned more often.
“We’ve been implementing SAP in phases over the past three years, and we’ve seen significant cost savings in many areas,” says Sloane. “SAP supports ‘best practices’ across the enterprise, allowing us to standardize business processes. In our accounting system, we now have a single chart of accounts for the entire business, which is a big help.”
Intelligent Business
The success of the transactional system convinced Mannington Mills to implement SAP Business Intelligence applications, which take transactional data and restructure it to produce information that helps executives make timely and informed decisions. The company is so convinced of the value of SAP’s latest BI environment that they have sized their BI system larger than their transactional system.
“We've already taken our inventory data and loaded that on our BI system, and we intend to continue loading data to create similar reporting on our sales and financial activity,” says Leonowich. “BI is extremely important to us moving forward, so we’re running it in the most robust environment we’ve ever had, with redundant application servers, database servers, multiple fibre paths and a dedicated Dell/EMC SAN.”
With all the new functionality of its enterprise SAP environment, Mannington Mills is determined to keep its datacenter running as efficiently as possible. The company has consolidated onto Dell servers in recent years and started using VMware five years ago to help curb server sprawl. As it began implementing its SAP applications, Mannington Mills first virtualized its test environment and soon will be using virtualization in its SAP production environment
“Virtualization has enabled us to reduce the number of physical servers in our datacenter by 25 percent and saved us money by reducing our administration workload,” says Leonowich. “Our IT staff spends less time maintaining systems and more time innovating, which is where the value is.”
The Environmentally-Conscious Datacenter
Virtualization and consolidation have enabled Mannington Mills to reduce the power needed to run and cool its IT systems. This has helped allow Mannington to run only one of its two datacenter air conditioning systems at a time. This reinforces the company's sense of environmental responsibility, a fundamental principle that played a role in its decision to partner with Dell.
“We believe that being environmentally friendly is doing the right thing and feel that Dell shares many of the same values as we do,” says Sloane. “Its commitment to reducing its own environmental impact, its support of initiatives like the Green Grid, and the energy savings features of its products have convinced us that we’ve chosen a good partner with Dell.”
Positioned For Growth
With more than 80 percent of the SAP rollout now complete, the Mannington Mills Technology Team has no regrets. “Dell’s SAP Competency Center has helped us with all the challenges, every step of the way. They’ve shown tremendous commitment to our project and consistently exceeded our expectations,” says Leonowich. "Moving to open standards turned out to be a great decision for us.”
The company is poised to scale rapidly as its business grows. “I am very comfortable with our decision to partner with Dell on this project and feel confident that this environment can support us well into the future,” says Leonowich. “We can recommend to any business considering implementing ERP that Dell’s solution is production-quality and enterprise-ready.”
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