Peer to Peer

Eveready gets the power of Red (Hat)

The main driving force for new systems is the integration of business processes, a single window view of business, seamless integration of information, smarter inventory management and seamless financial consolidation Arup Choudhary GM, IT Eveready Industries

When it was time to replace its home-grown systems, Eveready chose Red Hat Linux to run its mission-critical ERP processes. Shivani Shinde reports

The ‘Give me Red’ advertisement campaign emphasises the brand recall that Eveready has in India. For its mission-critical ERP too, the company chose a ‘Red’ platform—Linux server software from Red Hat.

The need to integrate and streamline processes was the reason for moving from a solution developed in-house. Eveready has nine factories, 14 sales offices and 44 godowns, and the requirement was to connect all these to the company’s headquarters.

One system to integrate all

Before going in for new servers and an overhaul of systems, Eveready had a solution called Matman for the factories with Sybase running on Sun Solaris. The sales and distribution module was designed on Oracle and Java, and the head office was using a Sun server running a system that was developed in-house.

A financial and payroll system was put in place by the company’s internal development team, again on Sybase and APT. The Sybase server ran on Sun Solaris, while the Oracle-Java application server was hosted on Windows 2000 (earlier powered by Windows NT 4.0). Solaris was deployed on 10 application and database servers, and the 14 branch offices and head office internal LAN were configured on 25 Windows 2000 servers.

Thus, the need for a new system stemmed from the need to integrate all this functionality. Arup Choudhary, GM, IT, explains that the main driving force for new systems is the integration of business processes, a single window view of business, seamless integration of information, smarter inventory management and seamless financial consolidation.

The need for Linux

Once the company was able to identify the problem, they realised that the most crucial application that they required was a robust ERP system. “We had three options to choose from—SAP, Oracle and JD Edwards,” says Choudhary. They chose Oracle.

Eveready decided to implement Oracle E-Business Suite 11i.5.9 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v.3. It has managed to deploy its ERP system on basic, low-cost Intel-based servers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3.0 and Oracle 11i on two Dell 4-CPU Xeon MP 2.7 GHz machines with 4 GB RAM each attached to an EMC shared storage box.

“We deployed Linux on account of its compatibility with other applications that we were planning to install. We received support from our three partners. Red Hat has a good support system in the eastern region of the country, Oracle provided end-to-end OS level support, and even TCS, our ERP implementation partner, was comfortable working on Linux,” explains Choudhary.

The other reason that Choudhary cites in the decision to deploy Linux-based servers was the fact that they were using Unix. They had seen the benefits of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the mail-proxy in 2002. Eveready was convinced that the solution was reliable and powerful enough to run its mission-critical ERP infrastructure.

Choudhary is of the opinion that Linux servers are on par with any other stable operating system. “In terms of security, the Linux kernel is difficult to crack. And there are no support issues,” adds Choudhary.

Today, Eveready has one testing and development server that runs Oracle 11i on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Two production servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3.0 are networked to an external storage area network configured in failover mode.

All services, including database, authentication, infrastructure, forms and Web services have been distributed between the two nodes. With the Red Hat Cluster Suite, these services are smoothly transferred to the running node from the failed node with minimal delay, which is typically within a few seconds depending upon the number of services active at any given point of time.

Challenges

Eveready’s products are available in more than two million shops, with the company’s internal distribution system itself catering to 6,00,000 retail outlets through more than 3,000 retail stockists and 1,000 van operators.

Apart from the fact that they needed a robust system which could not only seamlessly integrate with the earlier database but also be robust, change management was also on the agenda. Since the systems would be deployed at the factory, the skill levels of users had to to brought up to the mark.

Says Choudhary, “We spent three months training people who would be associated with the systems. We started by identifying key people in each area and trained them in the required skills.” Thanks to the training, he feels that the transition has been smooth.

Basket of benefits

The changeover has cost Rs 5.5 crore, including hardware and networking spread over a period of three years. The implementation was started in July 2004 and the system went live in September 2005.

Choudhary feels that though it is too early to comment on the benefits, some of the immediate effects are evident as the value chain gets linked. “Since we are in the manufacturing business, we need to keep a check right from procurement to selling. It’s a cycle and each element is dependent on the other. At least now everything is seamlessly integrated,” he notes.

Now that the implementation has been completed, the company plans to build on the system. Choudhary believes that, with time, they will be in a position to provide better value-added features to customers as well as suppliers. “We plan to have a supply portal which will help in providing details of transactions related to shipment, payment, production and other areas. For our customers we plan to implement Oracle Trade Management Module which will allow features related to claims, settlements, receivable status, etc.,” says he.

Choudhary is quite confident about the successful run on Linux. With strong benefits visible, Eveready has now purchased Linux-based storage servers such as the latest Dell-Veritas offerings to maintain a unified architecture.

shivani@expresscomputeronline.com