TVS Motor Company: Ensuring System Uptime Through Collaboration with SAP Enterprise Support

Transcription

1 2013 SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. Picture Credit TVS Motor Limited, Hosur, India. Used with permission. TVS Motor : Ensuring System Uptime Through Collaboration with SAP Enterprise Support

2 TVS Motor Limited Headquarters Hosur, India Industry Automotive Products and Services Motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, and three-wheelers Web Site SAP Solutions and Services SAP Enterprise Support services How does a firm become one of the global top ten two-wheeler manufacturers? TVS Motor Limited does it through innovative IT programs and a business powered by SAP software. Plus, SAP Enterprise Support services deliver critical, trusted expertise that contributes to the firm s ongoing success. SAP Enterprise Support helped us ensure sustainable operations with 100% system uptime, says K.N. Swaminathan, general manager of information systems for TVS Motor. 2 / SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

3 Building the best bikes in India TVS Motor, the flagship company of the US$4 billion TVS Group, manufactures a wide range of two-wheelers, from mopeds to racing-inspired motorcycles. The company operates four plants, including three in India located at Hosur and Mysore in southern India and in Himachal Pradesh in northern India and one in Indonesia. Its more than 7,000 employees help produce approximately 2.5 million units a year. 7,000+ Employees 3 / SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

4 Committed to quality and leadership Already an industry leader, TVS Motor has a vision of becoming one of the top 5 two-wheeler manufacturers in Asia. As part of that drive, it is committed to total quality and to being responsive to customer requirements and ensuring total customer satisfaction. The company leverages technology as a way of honing and sustaining its leadership position and profitable standing. TVS Motor has long used a range of SAP software to run its critical processes. But the company s managers were well aware that employees busy performing a dizzying array of tasks might not be fully utilizing all of the features of the powerful SAP software at their disposal. Manual efforts resulted in inefficiencies that led to thousands of unneeded hours of work being performed annually unnecessarily weighing down the company s bottom line. Moreover, the IT group was only able to identify and resolve end-user issues after they became critical problems. Finding this situation intolerable, the company s information systems general manager engaged SAP Enterprise Support services to identify ways to streamline its business processes and identify bottlenecks before they escalated into more serious issues. 4 / SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

5 Opting for a proven approach To move forward and help ensure success, TVS Motor chose to participate in the SAP Enterprise Support Advisory Council. This council was designed to help companies strategically consolidate, align, harmonize, and optimize their mission-critical IT systems by leveraging the available features of the SAP Solution Manager application management solution. As a long-term customer, TVS Motor already had a strong relationship with SAP. Therefore, it chose to work with SAP Enterprise Support because of SAP s proven, industry-leading technology and its time-tested, standardized approach to managing large, complex projects. 5 / SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

6 Taking advantage of expert guidance Consultants from SAP Enterprise Support analyzed the company s business process functions from end to end. What they found was that TVS Motor employees were spending significant time and manual effort monitoring production systems, including the SAP ERP application, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) application, and the SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP NetWeaver PI) offering. The team members also discovered that micromonitoring was not done, and connection issues were never identified. Moreover, they found a number of common errors in message flows. We were able to interact with SAP experts on various topics by attending expert-guided implementation training delivered through the SAP Enterprise Support Academy program. This provided the tools and knowledge we needed to solve our queries during various stages of the implementation and to fine-tune our metrics and alerts, says T. Suresh, systems manager for TVS Motor. TVS Motor s BASIS (SAP core technology) teams worked extremely closely with SAP advisors across the globe, leveraging everyone s respective skills to ensure success. After the training sessions, TVS Motor upgraded to the latest version of SAP Solution Manager. It then configured technical monitoring within SAP Solution Manager of all its host systems, databases, and SAP software instances. This included monitoring connections and SAP NetWeaver BW. The collaborative work undertaken by TVS Motor and SAP made the implementation of the technical alerts and monitoring a success, enabling TVS to realize the benefits of proactive monitoring. T.G. Dhandapani, CIO, TVS Motor Limited 6 / SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

7 Monitoring to ensure errors are addressed in a timely fashion SAP Enterprise Support provided us with a platform overview of all completed modifications, including changes to custom objects and software maintenance as well as our SAP ERP application s level of consistency in managing request data that s being transported, explains Suresh. Connection monitoring for remote function calls made TVS Motor aware of data errors between SAP NetWeaver PI and another third-party software vendor in the message flow. At the same time, monitoring SAP NetWeaver BW helps ensure that no issues occur as data is processed. SAP Solution Manager sends an alert via to the TVS Motor IT team when any issues are detected. The stability and reliability of our SAP software landscape after the implementation was praised by both the business-user community and our senior leadership. K.N. Swaminathan, General Manager, TVS Motor Limited 7 / SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

8 Enjoying a proactive approach to issue resolution The project was completed with results that very much impressed managers at TVS Motor. Due to the automated monitoring enabled by SAP Solution Manager, issues are now addressed before they lead to more serious system hangs and end-user complaints. We now have complete governance over the issues and bottlenecks associated with our production systems, operations, and data, says Suresh. In fact, since implementation, the TVS Motor IT team has proactively resolved an average of 10 issues per month to maintain 100% system uptime. Instead of manually monitoring systems during all three work shifts, the company s IT team receives alerts whenever issues are detected. This frees the team to focus on more strategic activities. Moreover, TVS Motor was able to identify and optimize its top potentially costly processes. As part of the optimization, the company reduced the average response time of its legacy, third-party database from 550 ms to 460 ms. In validating these achievements, SAP gave special recognition to TVS Motor for enterprise support adoption as part of its Awards for Customer Excellence. SAP Enterprise Support helped us implement technical alerting and monitoring using SAP Solution Manager, which reduced our manual efforts and has enabled us to proactively address all system issues. T. Suresh, Systems Manager, TVS Motor Limited 8 / SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

9 Gaining transparency via automated monitoring TVS Motor was extremely satisfied with the results and overall service quality delivered by the SAP Enterprise Support advisory council team. We are seeing the added value of having chosen SAP as our premium partner in this enormous challenge. We especially liked the fact that the connections between our systems and the performance of the systems were monitored and the issues were handled with great ease by the SAP Solution Manager development team, says Suresh. Going forward, the company plans to use technical alerts and monitoring to keep watch over upgrades to the SAP NetWeaver Portal component and SAP NetWeaver PI. These alerts and monitoring will provide our management team with more transparency via automated, consolidated reporting, concludes Swaminathan. CMP22747 (13/02) 2013 SAP AG or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 9 / 9

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