Grupo Hefame Managing hundreds of thousands of orders every day to deliver on time to a growing customer base IBM gives us support to ensure that our business- critical SAP solutions run at peak efficiency.” Amando Vela, CIO, Grupo Hefame

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Amando Vela
CIO
Grupo Hefame
Based in Murcia, Spain, Grupo Hefame distributes pharmaceutical
products through a network of offices and warehouses across Spain,
and is currently among the three leading pharmaceutical distributors
in the country.
Business challenge
Delivering on time, every time is essential to
keep clients happy and win market share.
How could pharmaceuticals distributor
Grupo Hefame process daily peaks in client
orders quickly and efficiently?
Transformation
With its business systems running on a new
IBM platform delivered by partner AGEDOS
Business Datacenter, the company now
handles peaks of up to 500,000 order lines
daily, helping it to deliver without delay.
Grupo Hefame
Managing hundreds
of thousands of orders
every day to deliver
on time to a growing
customer base
“IBM gives us support to
ensure that our business-
critical SAP solutions run
at peak efficiency.”
Amando Vela, CIO, Grupo Hefame
Business benefits:
50%
increase in SAP application
performance support
reliably on-time deliveries
99%
acceleration in business
analytics reporting enables
better decision-making
50%
faster invoice processing
achieved, for greater
accuracy and efficiency

2. 2
Securing an
industry-leading
position
Spain’s pharmaceuticals distribution
industry is increasingly competitive, with
more than 80 companies striving to win
market share. To stand out as leaders,
firms need to focus on finding the right
tools to offer ultra-reliable, high-quality
service that protects the loyalty of existing
clients and attracts new ones.
Pharmaceuticals cooperative Grupo
Hefame aims to overtake its closest
competitor to become the second-largest
distributor in Spain.
Amando Vela, CIO at Grupo Hefame,
explains, “Delivering accurately and on
time is essential to protect our hard-won
client relationships and win new business.
To achieve this, we must process up
to 500,000 daily order lines from our
pharmacies between 1:30 and 2:30 pm,
and everything—from processing, loading
and shipping the orders—must be
completed within that one-hour slot.”
Grupo Hefame relies on SAP solutions to
drive operations smoothly, including order
management, logistics and invoicing. As
its business grew, the demands on Grupo
Hefame’s SAP systems were increasing.
The company realized that its existing
server and storage infrastructure would
soon become unable to support its
operations, and decided to look for a fresh
platform to support its growth objectives.
Rock-solid platform
for growth
To support its infrastructure renewal,
Grupo Hefame engaged experts
from IBM Business Partner AGEDOS
Business Datacenter.
Amando Vela explains, “AGEDOS
Business Datacenter was a natural
choice, as their team have worked with
us on many occasions over the years and
know our business and requirements
very well.”
AGEDOS Business Datacenter proposed
an active-active data center configuration
based on IBM® Power System S824
servers connected to IBM FlashSystem®
solid-state storage offering ultra-low
latency, and cost-efficient IBM Storwize®
V5000 disk systems.

3. 3
Virtualized with IBM PowerVM®
software and running the IBM AIX®
operating system, the new environment
is configured for high availability with
IBM PowerHA® software.
The IBM Business Partner also helped
to virtualize Grupo Hefame’s storage
environment by implementing IBM
SAN Volume Controller built with IBM
Spectrum Virtualize™ software, defining
an active-active storage architecture
based on IBM San Volume Controller
Stretched Cluster.
As a next step, Grupo Hefame
migrated its SAP landscape to the new
IBM platform.
For analytics and reporting, the company
migrated its SAP Business Warehouse
application and SAP BusinessObjects
business intelligence solutions to the
IBM platform, connected to a SAP HANA
database on x86 servers and running
the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
operating system.
Amando Vela states, “We feel that
IBM gives us the support we need to
ensure that our business-critical SAP
solutions run at peak efficiency—and
we are confident that our business is in
safe hands.”
Unprecedented
performance and
reliability
With its business systems running on
a high-performance, high-availability
IBM platform, Grupo Hefame can
process thousands of orders during
business-critical peak times without the
threat of unplanned downtime.
Amando Vela says, “Our SAP platform
refresh was a triumph—the numbers
speak for themselves. SAP application
performance has increased by
50 percent, enabling us to cut our
monthly invoicing process in half, thus
improving efficiency and customer
satisfaction by reducing payment delays
and errors.

4. Please Recycle
Solution components
• IBM® FlashSystem® 840
• IBM Power® System S824
• IBM Storwize® V5000
• IBM AIX®
• IBM Performance Management for
Power Systems
• IBM PowerHA®
• IBM PowerVM®
• IBM Spectrum Virtualize™
• IBM SAN Volume Controller
• SAP Business Warehouse
• SAP BusinessObjects Business
Intelligence
• SAP ERP
• SAP HANA
• IBM Business Partner AGEDOS
Business Datacenter
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Business Partner, or visit the following website:
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“Better still, we have accelerated
our business analytics reporting by
99 percent—from more than two days
to just 30 minutes in some cases. This
means that we now have ultra-fast insight
into aspects such as customer demand,
which we can use to optimize processes
and ensure we are equipped to complete
orders faster and more efficiently.”
He concludes, “Crucially, processing all
of our customer orders on time enables
us to deliver exceptional service to our
clients and encourage their loyalty. With
IBM solutions supporting our business,
we can confidently pursue our goal
of becoming Spain’s second-largest
pharmaceuticals distributor.”
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