Swiss-based SFS Group develops and manufactures mechanical fastening systems and precision formed parts for multiple markets, including the automotive, aircraft, construction and medical industries. The company’s specialized components and tools are found in an array of products from airplanes to smartphones.
Founded more than 100 years ago, SFS Group employs 10,000 people across 100 locations worldwide. To support its distributed workforce and global manufacturing operations and to meet customer expectations, SFS Group launched an ambitious digitization project with the aim of improving operations and supporting next-generation business applications such as SAP S/4HANA.
Cloud Upgrade Boosts Performance
SFS Group needed to expand and enhance its existing private cloud, consolidate systems and processes, and ensure the data centers can support the new systems. The company partnered with Hitachi Vantara, which is supplying a full private cloud infrastructure with converged and hyperconverged solutions.
The company’s mission-critical applications are powered by more than 70 Hitachi DS120 and DS240 Advanced Servers in tandem with the hyperconverged solution Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC. SFS Group data is stored on the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G350 and Hitachi VSP G600 hybrid flash systems. The integrated solution has reduced operational risk and improved disaster recovery.
The private cloud on Hitachi UCP CI allows SFS Group to manage 800 virtual and physical servers running Linux and Windows and support SAP ERP, Oracle Database, and Microsoft SQL Server software. Workloads are distributed across VMware vSphere clusters, which maximize resources through virtualization. Network operators rely on 300 virtual servers and Citrix technology to provide employees across the globe with virtual desktops.
Greater Support for Growth and Resiliency
As part of the technology upgrade, SFS Group is working to align its business processes with industry standards, which will reduce customization and maintenance costs. The company is moving to SAP S/4 HANA and will streamline operations by consolidating its existing ERP applications. It already has begun migrating applications and online stores to SAP HANA running on the Hitachi Vantara private cloud.
To protect against data loss, SFS is using the Hitachi Data Protection Suite to provide a centralized backup of all data from SFS Group’s enterprise storage platform, its Hitachi NAS Platform, and its Hitachi Unified Storage VM file storage. The ability to have rapid backups and improved disaster recovery increases the availability of manufacturing lines on the production floor. It has simplified disaster recovery processes for the SAP application server cluster and provides data mirroring between locations using Hitachi Global-Active Device for synchronous replication.
Creating the infrastructure around a single, standardized platform and automating system administration processes has simplified network configuration and deployment. SFS Group notes the benefits from the entire project have reduced total cost of ownership by 20 percent. SFS also has seen gains in IT staff productivity and increased flexibility in IT services, while reducing time spent on administrative tasks. SFS Groups’ single-vendor approach with Hitachi Vantara provides additional efficiencies in operations, procurement, and support.