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Amando Vela CIO Grupo Hefame

Based in Murcia, Spain, Grupo Hefame distributes pharmaceutical products through a network of offices and warehouses across Spain, and is currently among the three leading pharmaceutical distributors in the country.

Business challengeDelivering on time, every time is essential to keep clients happy and win market share. How could pharmaceuticals distributor Grupo Hefame process daily peaks in client orders quickly and efficiently?

TransformationWith its business systems running on a new IBM platform delivered by partner AGEDOS Business Datacenter, the company now handles peaks of up to 500,000 order lines daily, helping it to deliver without delay.

Grupo HefameManaging hundreds of thousands of orders every day to deliver on time to a growing customer base

“IBM gives us support to ensure that our business-critical SAP solutions run at peak efficiency.”

Amando Vela, CIO, Grupo Hefame

Business benefits:

50% increase in SAP application performance support reliably on-time deliveries

99% acceleration in business analytics reporting enables better decision-making

50% faster invoice processing achieved, for greater accuracy and efficiency

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Securing an industry-leading position Spain’s pharmaceuticals distribution industry is increasingly competitive, with more than 80 companies striving to win market share. To stand out as leaders, firms need to focus on finding the right tools to offer ultra-reliable, high-quality service that protects the loyalty of existing clients and attracts new ones.

Pharmaceuticals cooperative Grupo Hefame aims to overtake its closest competitor to become the second-largest distributor in Spain.

Amando Vela, CIO at Grupo Hefame, explains, “Delivering accurately and on time is essential to protect our hard-won client relationships and win new business. To achieve this, we must process up to 500,000 daily order lines from our pharmacies between 1:30 and 2:30 pm, and everything—from processing, loading and shipping the orders—must be completed within that one-hour slot.”

Grupo Hefame relies on SAP solutions to drive operations smoothly, including order management, logistics and invoicing. As its business grew, the demands on Grupo Hefame’s SAP systems were increasing. The company realized that its existing server and storage infrastructure would soon become unable to support its operations, and decided to look for a fresh platform to support its growth objectives.

Rock-solid platform for growth

To support its infrastructure renewal, Grupo Hefame engaged experts from IBM Business Partner AGEDOS Business Datacenter.

Amando Vela explains, “AGEDOS Business Datacenter was a natural choice, as their team have worked with us on many occasions over the years and know our business and requirements very well.”

AGEDOS Business Datacenter proposed an active-active data center configuration based on IBM® Power System S824 servers connected to IBM FlashSystem® solid-state storage offering ultra-low latency, and cost-efficient IBM Storwize® V5000 disk systems.

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Virtualized with IBM PowerVM® software and running the IBM AIX® operating system, the new environment is configured for high availability with IBM PowerHA® software.

The IBM Business Partner also helped to virtualize Grupo Hefame’s storage environment by implementing IBM SAN Volume Controller built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize™ software, defining an active-active storage architecture based on IBM San Volume Controller Stretched Cluster.

As a next step, Grupo Hefame migrated its SAP landscape to the new IBM platform.

For analytics and reporting, the company migrated its SAP Business Warehouse application and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions to the IBM platform, connected to a SAP HANA database on x86 servers and running the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system.

Amando Vela states, “We feel that IBM gives us the support we need to ensure that our business-critical SAP solutions run at peak efficiency—and we are confident that our business is in safe hands.”

Unprecedented performance and reliabilityWith its business systems running on a high-performance, high-availability IBM platform, Grupo Hefame can process thousands of orders during business-critical peak times without the threat of unplanned downtime.

Amando Vela says, “Our SAP platform refresh was a triumph—the numbers speak for themselves. SAP application performance has increased by 50 percent, enabling us to cut our monthly invoicing process in half, thus improving efficiency and customer satisfaction by reducing payment delays and errors.

Please Recycle

Solution components•IBM® FlashSystem® 840

•IBM Power® System S824

•IBM Storwize® V5000

•IBM AIX®

•IBM Performance Management for Power Systems

•IBM PowerHA®

•IBM PowerVM®

•IBM Spectrum Virtualize™

•IBM SAN Volume Controller

•SAP Business Warehouse

•SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

•SAP ERP

•SAP HANA

•IBM Business Partner AGEDOS Business Datacenter

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“Better still, we have accelerated our business analytics reporting by 99 percent—from more than two days to just 30 minutes in some cases. This means that we now have ultra-fast insight into aspects such as customer demand, which we can use to optimize processes and ensure we are equipped to complete orders faster and more efficiently.”

He concludes, “Crucially, processing all of our customer orders on time enables us to deliver exceptional service to our clients and encourage their loyalty. With IBM solutions supporting our business, we can confidently pursue our goal of becoming Spain’s second-largest pharmaceuticals distributor.”

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