Case Studies: Manufacturing

Del Monte Foods wanted to make IT a driver of business success, but its lean IT staff was continually preoccupied with handling emergencies. By adopting a Microsoft Services Premier Support agreement, Del Monte’s IT staff has boosted the time that it devotes to proactive support from 20 percent to 70 percent. Support incidents for key technologies have dropped by 67 percent, and the availability of those technologies has soared to 99.99 percent.

Ballard Power Systems, a world leader in fuel cell development, needed to give its researchers faster, fuller insights into manufacturing and test processes and data, in order to cut time-to-market and increase competitiveness. Ballard plans to achieve its goals—including a 30 percent cut in time-to-market—with a business intelligence solution for manufacturing, based on Incuity EMI software from Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Incuity Software.

With worldwide revenue of U.S.$22.9 billion, FUJIFILM Group is a leader in manufacturing and marketing a range of products for imaging information, and document solutions. FUJIFILM Computer System Company (FFCS), a subsidiary of FUJIFILM Corporation, serves the entire FUJIFILM Group with IT expertise. As FUJIFILM Group prepares for its 75th anniversary in 2009, FFCS was tasked with enhancing data integration across the group’s 220 companies. Building upon the success of an earlier deployment of SAP running on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000, chose SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) for its Global SAP System. When SAP has been fully deployed to all organizations within FUJIFILM Group, SQL Server 2005 will be supporting several terabytes of data. FFCS has found that SQL Server 2005 is easy to manage, and provides the scalability the global organization needs.

SAP software is mission critical to the Missiles and Fire Control unit of global aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin, which wanted to significantly reduce the costs of its deployment while improving its performance. Its solution: migrate the SAP infrastructure from Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) platforms running UNIX to the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 on Intel technologies. The company expects to save up to 41 percent of SAP hardware (server and storage), software, and maintenance costs over the next five years—while exceeding the performance it saw on the RISC-based UNIX solution. That in turn contributes to the company’s business agility and competitiveness, helping it to continue to lead in its highly competitive market.