Case Studies: Manufacturing

American Power Conversion (APC) contemplated major increases in its use of Siebel software—including consolidation of separate instances into a single, global database and expanding its use to include the real-time needs of its call center. That required even more performance than it was getting from Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database software. So, the company upgraded to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). Siebel transaction response times are 100 percent faster; the call center responds more quickly and cost-effectively to customers; the solution will scale to support a 300 percent increase in the current 3,000-user base; and availability is “rock-solid” according to the company. APC gets all this and more for less than half of the estimated cost of an Oracle-based solution, saving the company U.S.$800,000.

Berlin Packaging maintained contact information on its 21,000 customers in a PeopleSoft ERP database—but the company’s sales force often updated their customer contacts only in their personal Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 contact lists. The company wanted to link the two solutions so that sales people could always access contacts from Office Outlook wherever they were, while the PeopleSoft database would always contain up-to-date records. A custom application from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Emerging Solutions makes this possible. The result: Better customer information from the application enables Berlin Packaging to make millions of dollars in increased revenues. Productivity is up, as is customer and employee satisfaction. According to the CIO, this may be the best U.S.$20,000 investment the company has ever made.

Unilever, the global consumer products giant that sells some 400 brands in 100 countries, generating 2005 revenue of U.S.$50.6 billion, needed to upgrade its SAP R\3 supply chain infrastructure that was hosted on an Oracle\UNIX solution. Seeking a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), Unilever tested Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) using 1.5 terabytes of data and double the transaction loads of its U.S. operations. The company was so impressed by the results that it is deploying Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running on the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems operating system, hosted on an HP Superdome computer to deploy SAP ERP to support its North American operations. Unilever expects a 15 percent reduction in TCO, and the scalability, agility, and reliability its operations require.