CASE STUDY
material management, is now successfully
running in the new Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX
environment. The project also came in on
time and on budget and any issues that
arose during design and implementation
were quickly resolved.
LULU GROUP’S IT ENVIRONMENT IS
FUTURE-PROOFED FOR YEARS
TO COME.
“The Fujitsu local and global teams, together
with the LuLu Group team, did a great
job in ensuring maximum uptime and
minimal disruption to the business. That is
impressive,” said Rao.
The LuLu Group now has an innovative
and future-proof business environment
that provides not only a more responsive
user experience but also benefits from all
innovations that SAP brings now and in the
future with SAP HANA.
For example, the entire legacy 8TB database
has been shrunk to below 2TB using the
SAP HANA compression feature. The system
enables accelerated data flow as well as
faster access to data sources from various
SAP and non-SAP systems.
“We can now get analytics and complex
reporting within seconds instead of
hours,” said Rao. “That improves user
efficiency and boosts productivity, which
ultimately leads to a better customer
experience and satisfaction.”
THE MIGRATION ITSELF WAS
CAREFULLY PLANNED SO THERE
WOULD BE MINIMAL DOWNTIME.
FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMEFLEX for
SAP Landscapes allows all of LuLu Group’s
stores to handle overnight data processing,
compared to managing it in stages as
was the case previously. This makes for a
more efficient supply chain with automatic
inventory replenishment. It also has much
enhanced availability and business continuity.
With new highly improved IT operations
processes, even day-to-day IT operations were
streamlined. By making use of SnapShots of
the databases the back-up windows of the
environment were greatly reduced.
“The application back-up between primary
and secondary databases used to take too
www.intelligentcio.com
much time,” said Rao. “Now, we can back-up
our entire application and database far more
quickly, which gives us better resilience.”
With the added boost of having FlexFrame
manage all application services, the new
environment also provides a roadmap for
future growth, critical to a company that is
expanding so rapidly.
“We could easily manage more stores
within the existing infrastructure by just
scaling more server and storage resources
and, with plans to open 50 to 60 in the
next five years, it is great to have that
bandwidth,” said Rao.
The LuLu Group now has a robust, agile and
flexible infrastructure solution underpinning
its entire operations, ensuring optimal
performance and seamless communications
between systems. This will provide a solid
platform on which to build for the future.
“The FlexFrame-powered SAP Landscapes
advantage is that it encompasses the entire
hardware and SAP application landscape
for running SAP HANA from storage to
servers to networking in one pre-configured,
turn-key solution that is simple to deploy
and flexible to run,” said Rao. “As we grow,
we align our project steps with SAP and
with Fujitsu experts and appreciate this
as a very trustful collaboration. Fujitsu has
provided us with the ideal solution to run
our business more efficiently and to provide
SAP HANA functionality across more than
120 stores.”
We asked Madhava Rao further questions to
find out more about the system:
INTELLIGENTCIO
67