Merchandising and supply chain solution from IBM and SAP

The issues

The evolution of your supply chain infrastructure

Integrate your value chain with a flexible and responsive merchandising and supply chain infrastructure. High-performance, standards-based platforms combined with sophisticated management software can help retail IT organizations make the transition from complex, resource-intensive, localized or isolated infrastructures to integrated and streamlined IT architectures.

The benchmark

Innovate. Operate. Differentiate.

IBM offers a variety of IT services and capabilities to help your company realize value from your current and future ERP investments. By employing IBM Full Economy Model for SAP, our professionals can assist you in redesigning and enhancing your IT environment using a holistic and comprehensive approach.

Our consultants, supported by a network of IBM and SAP global solution centers, provide a reservoir of extensive industry knowledge and a proven approach to helping companies and institutions resolve complex business challenges of implementing, operating, maintaining and optimizing your investment in SAP. We offer:

• More than 175,000 highly trained consultants ready to assist your company in streamlining your implementation of SAP Business Suite solutions.
• Application management services and on demand hosting services for any SAP portfolio, plus SAP education and training.
• More than 60,000 business consulting specialists (including 10,000 SAP professionals) in over 160 countries - making it the world's largest consulting services organization and the largest SAP practice.

The components

Fit-for-purpose strategy for merchandising and supply chain

Our solution is designed to fit your need with a combination of IBM and SAP applications and solutions.

• The SAP for Retail set of solutions is designed specifically for the new retail environment, covering key business processes from forecasting and planning to allocation and replenishment.
• IBM Dynamic Infrastructure for SAP Business Suite is designed to allow businesses to build an IT architecture that quickly adapts to business changes by provisioning and removing servers as needed, extending the value of SAP software investments.
• The IBM WebSphere® family offers a flexible integration and application platform to meet a diverse range of requirements. Capabilities include business portals, business process management and integration, product information management, mobile computing, and application servers, and are designed to fully interoperate with SAP NetWeaver®.
• IBM DB2® Universal Database™ includes features specifically optimized for the SAP environment. These new features help simplify administration, minimize configuration and installation, and improve overall performance for SAP solutions.
• IBM Systems, with their diverse, multiplatform capabilities, offers the extraordinary flexibility required by end-to-end SAP implementation solutions.
• IBM System Storage solutions are based on open standards, and encompass an array of integrated products and services that include tape, disk, SAN (storage area networking), NAS gateway and management software.
• IBM's business consulting and systems integration services enable our customers to deploy new strategic business processes and SAP functions more quickly. We offer a broad range of services to span the complete SAP lifecycle, including:
  • Strategy
  • Business case
  • Project management
  • Business process design
  • Business transformation
  • Application design and architecture
  • Infrastructure
  • Data migration
  • Integration
  • Testing
  • Hosting
  • Training
  • Application maintenance

The implementation

Fossil works with IBM and SAP to achieve success

Fossil, Inc. selected IBM AIX® on IBM System p. The logical partitioning enabled Fossil to buy fewer physical servers initially, saving cost and footprint. Fossil implemented all of its SAP software applications on three IBM System p model 670 servers and one p690 server with the IBM DB2 database software managing the data. These physical servers are divided into more than 30 logical servers, and Fossil is able to allocate processor and memory resources between the environments exactly as required, rapidly and cost-effectively.

The solution helped Fossil meet several IT challenges by allowing the company to:

• Integrate processes across different geographies and customer groups.
• Create a scalable, flexible centralized IT service.
• Gain a consolidated view of global operations at high speed.

The cost of ownership

The financial impact

Working with IBM and SAP, your retail organization has the opportunity to significantly improve cost of ownership. We can help you:

• Accelerate and reduce costs of implementation through use of predefined SAP solutions and industry templates.
• Achieve economies of scale through business process outsourcing of commodity business aspects.
• Reduce administrative staff by utilizing IBM standardized SAP technical project management delivered by IBM's AMS division or IBM off-shore capabilities.
• Achieve first-class hardware performance.

Next steps

Questions about this solution? Contact an IBM-SAP specialist.