The EGGER Group is one of the world’s leading wood-based materials manufacturers. Headquartered in Austria, the family-owned company operates 19 production plants and 26 sales offices worldwide. The group employs 9,600 people and generated a consolidated turnover of 2.84 billion euros in the 2018/2019 financial year.
EGGER manufactures wood products such as chipboards and MDF boards for the furniture and interior design industry, as well as building products (OBS boards), sawn timber and high-quality laminate flooring for construction markets and DIY stores.
At-a-Glance
Demand for EGGER’s wood-based products is on the rise. To capture these new opportunities, the group aimed to accelerate and enhance its analytics capabilities to support data-driven decision-making. By deploying the SAP HANA data platform with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and SUSE Manager, the group has boosted analytics performance significantly while reducing administration workload. The SUSE solution delivers high availability, stability and performance to keep global operations on track.
O desafio
Sustainable, high-quality wood products are in demand, and business is booming for EGGER.
To support continuous business growth, EGGER must ensure it can capture every sales opportunity. The company’s decision- makers increasingly rely on analytics to uncover valuable — and potentially hidden — insights into the business.
Oliver Widhölzl, team leader data center operations at EGGER Group, begins: “Our global operations processes are highly centralized and digitized, and driven by SAP ERP business systems. Our decision makers need detailed information right away, and keeping up with demand for analytics was a significant challenge.”
“The combination of SAP HANA and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is allowing us to harness the full analytics potential of our business data, identify new business opportunities, and drive our growth.”
Solução SUSE
To boost analytics performance, accelerate reporting and provide business users with real-time insight into operations, EGGER decided to replace its traditional databases with the SAP HANA in-memory data platform.
Widhölzl says: “SAP HANA represented the perfect way to modernize and futureproof our extensive SAP application landscape, which is absolutely missioncritical.”
EGGER migrated its business intelligence application to SAP HANA, running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications.
Widhölzl comments: “We’ve been using SLES to underpin both SAP and non-SAP workloads for more than 15 years. SUSE solutions were the obvious choice for our new SAP HANA environment. SLES is an extremely stable, cost-efficient platform, helping to ensure high availability for SAP applications. In all the years we’ve worked with SUSE, we have never experienced any unplanned downtime.”
EGGER runs a total of 250 virtualized servers with SLES across 74 physical Cisco UCS blade servers, with VMware virtualization technology and NetApp storage arrays split across three data center locations. The newest systems are 30 SAP HANA instances powered by SLES for SAP Applications.
Beyond SAP applications, the group also relies on SLES for approximately 150 systems that run everything from Oracle databases to Java application servers and manufacturing control systems.
To centrally manage and monitor all 250 SUSE Linux instances, EGGER uses SUSE Manager. Using the automated patching capability of SUSE Manager, the group can keep its systems up to date with minimal manual effort.
Os resultados
By building its business on SLES, EGGER is boosting the efficiency of its IT function — helping the IT team to satisfy growing appetites for analytics across the organization.
In fact, since migrating its business intelligence application to the SAP HANA database, EGGER has significantly accelerated key analytics reports. Today, business users gain instant insight into operational data, enabling true data-driven decision-making.
Widhölzl comments, “Standardizing on SLES with a consistent configuration across 250 Linux instances has considerably increased IT efficiency.
“We know from more than a decade of experience that SUSE Linux offers reliability, stability and performance. SUSE support is very easy to work with and highly competent. We can reach out to key contacts directly and any questions get answered quickly.
“On top of that, because SLES for SAP Applications is optimized for SAP software, it includes tested performance tuning configurations, optimized memory management settings and a dedicated update channel.”
Automation for patching and other maintenance tasks from SUSE Manager enables EGGER Group to manage one of the largest SAP environments in Austria with a lean IT team.
Widhölzl adds: “We’re taking advantage of AutoYaST and other automation tools. Integration with SUSE Manager gives us a comprehensive overview of our entire Linux environment, granular data on our inventory facilitates system maintenance and IT compliance.”
He further concludes: “Building on SLES for SAP Applications and SUSE Manager has helped us lift our IT efficiency to new heights. The combination of SAP HANA and SLES for SAP Applications is allowing us to harness the full analytics potential of our business data, identify new business opportunities, and drive our growth.”