1. Matthias Schäfer
Head of Application
Development
HR Group
Business Challenge
Without the ability to adapt quickly to
changing fashion trends, major shoe retailer
HR Group risked carrying unsold and
discounted stock. How could HR Group
spot – or even predict – shifting tastes?
Transformation
By migrating SAP HANA to the IBM Power
Systems platform, HR Group accelerated
key analytics processes, delivering
near-instant insight into market trends, at
lower operational costs.
HR Group
Delivering instant sales
and stock analytics
with SAP HANA on
IBM Power Systems
“SAP HANA on IBM
Power Systems reduced
complexity and increased
energy efficiency in our
data center.”
Matthias Schäfer, Head of Application
Development, HR Group
Business benefits:
Near-instant
insight into market
trends to respond fast to
shifting demand
Optimizes
SAP system landscape to
reduce costs
60%
faster business processes
with half the processor cores Major footwear retailer HR Group, headquartered in Osnabrück, Germany,
sells through 2,500 locations, including 750 of its own branches, in
20 countries. Employing 5,000 people, the company sells 49 million items a
year and achieves sales of EUR600 million.
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2. Challenge in detail
To protect their margins, fashion
retailers must react rapidly to an ever-
changing market. Allocating the optimal
assortment of products to each branch
is an effective way to maximize revenues
and avoid the cost of unsold stock—
but how could HR Group identify and
deliver the right mix to each store in a
timely manner?
Solution delivery
HR Group migrated to SAP HANA
on IBM® Power Systems™ for SAP
Business Warehouse, taking advantage
of the latest IBM POWER8® technology
and centralized IBM Storwize®
V5000 storage.
Quick insights needed
to keep up with fashion
trends
Trends in fashion change rapidly and it
is crucial for retailers to respond fast to
shifting market demands. As the industry
faces shrinking profit margins, it becomes
particularly important to be able to allocate
the right products in the right sizes to the
right branches at the right time, to help
cut costs, reduce unsold and discounted
stock, and maximize potential revenue.
Matthias Schäfer, Head of Application
Development at HR Group, says, “We
noticed that the business is getting faster
and faster in terms of customer response,
distribution and the whims of fashion.
To sell our stock across all our branches
at the best possible prices, we needed
instant insights into customer behavior.
Our regional sales managers can only
effectively plan campaigns when they have
access to up-to -the second sales figures.
Using reliable facts enables them to adapt
the product range in our branches to
match customers’ tastes.”
The company supplies some 2,500
locations with about 4,000 different
articles in various sizes. Previously, HR
Group based its distribution and sales
planning on product categories, not actual
sales of individual items at each branch.
This could lead to situations where one
branch had sold out while another had a
surplus of particular products.
Matthias Schäfer explains, “All fashion
retailers are under a lot of pressure right
now. Tight profit margins mean that even
small optimizations of our planning and
supply processes can make the difference
between profit and loss.”
Deploying SAP HANA
on IBM Power Systems
To react faster to sales patterns, HR
Group worked closely with IBM and IBM
Business Partner FRITZ & MACZIOL
to deploy SAP HANA for one of its SAP
Business Warehouse applications.
The company connected its existing
systems to SAP HANA using the SAP
Landscape Transformation Replication
Server software. HR Group also linked
point-of-sales devices in its 750 branches
to SAP HANA using SAP Point-of-Sale
Data Management.
Matthias Schäfer says, “By combining
SAP HANA with our points of sale, we can
instantly analyze sales information from
750 branches. On top of that, we use SAP
POS Loss Prevention Analytics for Retail to
monitor our transactions and flag up fraud
and other suspicious activity as quickly
as possible.”
After the initial implementation of SAP
HANA on x86 servers, HR Group decided
to move to SAP HANA on IBM® Power
Systems. With core SAP solutions already
running on the IBM Power Systems™
platform, the move would simplify its IT
environment and streamline operations
and management processes. Today,
the company operates a homogenous
SAP solution landscape based on IBM
POWER8® technology.
Manfred Gries, Team Leader Data Center
Operations at HR Group, elaborates,
“When SAP HANA became available
on IBM Power Systems, we immediately
discussed this with IBM and our trusted
partner FRITZ & MACZIOL, because
we were keen to migrate to the latest
POWER8 servers to streamline our
SAP application operations processes
and retire the isolated x86 systems in
our SAP environment that only increased
the management workload. Having all
of our SAP applications on a single,
highly reliable server platform helps us
standardize systems management and
increase productivity within the IT team.”
The company runs its mission-critical SAP
ERP applications on application servers
in fully virtualized environments with IBM
PowerVM® and IBM AIX® on three IBM
Power® System S824 servers.
HR Group, IBM and FRITZ & MACZIOL
set up one IBM Power System S822L with
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run the
production SAP HANA database. The test
and development instance of SAP HANA
runs with IBM PowerVM® virtualization on
an IBM Power System S824 server, also
with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
“Having all of our SAP
applications on the single,
highly reliable IBM Power
Systems server platform
helps us standardize
systems management and
increase productivity within
the IT team.
Manfred Gries
Team Leader Data Center Operations
HR Group
3. Benefits in detail
• Ensures lightning-fast data analytics,
enabling near-instant insight into
market trends.
• Reduces the risk of carrying
unfashionable lines.
• Simplifies the SAP solution landscape
and cuts admin costs.
Key components
Industry: Retail
Applications: SAP® HANA®,
SAP for Retail, SAP Business Warehouse,
SAP BusinessObjects™ Mobile,
SAP Point-of-Sale Data Management,
SAP POS Loss Prevention Analytics for
Retail, SAP Landscape Transformation
Replication Server, SAPUI5
Hardware: IBM® Power® System S824,
IBM Power System S822L,
IBM Storwize® V5000,
IBM System Storage® DS3400
Software: IBM AIX®, IBM PowerVM®
Enterprise Edition,
IBM Spectrum Virtualize™,
IBM Spectrum Protect™ for SAP HANA,
IBM WebSphere® Commerce,
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Services: IBM Business Partner
FRITZ & MACZIOL
HR Group uses a central, fully redundant
storage solution based on two IBM
Storwize® V5000 systems, built with IBM
Spectrum Virtualize™ software, to provide
data storage for all SAP applications.
Using IBM Easy Tier® technology, the
company ensures that the most frequently
used data is automatically being moved to
ultra-fast flash storage.
For reliable back up of its SAP ERP
application data and the SAP HANA
database, HR Group relies on IBM
Spectrum Protect™ for Enterprise
Resource Planning Data Protection for
SAP HANA.
Direct cost savings
Running SAP HANA on IBM Power
Systems allowed HR Group to simplify and
streamline its IT environment. As a result,
the company currently saves EUR4,000
per month in hardware leasing costs.
Manfred Gries says, “The stability and
flexibility of IBM Power Systems ensures
that we can run our SAP applications,
including SAP HANA, reliably. The
advanced virtualization technology
gives us the opportunity to dynamically
optimize the resource utilization across
our SAP application landscape. In contrast
to dedicated SAP HANA appliances,
we expect SAP HANA on POWER to
seamlessly integrate into our virtualized
system environment, as we already
demonstrated with our test system.”
Furthermore, the virtualized storage
solution increases the performance of
the entire SAP system landscape by
seamlessly moving data to the most
appropriate storage system.
Faster, more detailed
planning
Using SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems
allowed HR Group to improve planning
and distribution substantially. Matthias
Schäfer says, “SAP HANA on IBM Power
Systems enables HR Group to run
complex planning analytics much faster
than before. Not only can we run existing
analytics more quickly, we are also able to
complete more-granular planning, so we
can now stock the right products at the
right branches more reliably than before.”
60% faster business processes
with half the processor cores
