With millions of consumers shopping online and on mobile, global use of once-only packaging for last-mile delivery has soared. For leading packaging manufacturer Mondi, protecting the environment and sustainability are top priorities, and the Mondi Action Plan 2030 (MAP2030) is a key enabler of the company’s climate action response.

MAP2030 includes ambitious targets for improving company efficiency, to ensure the lowest possible production wastage, streamlined business operations, and super-efficient logistics. To enhance the integration between its worldwide operations and unlock new decision-making insights for MAP2030, Mondi looked to its trusted SAP solutions and infrastructure experts from IBM.

Rainer Steffl, CIO at Mondi Group, says, “In partnership with IBM, we converted 40 factories across 15 countries to the cutting-edge SAP S/4HANA platform—and the move went perfectly. Although our journey is just beginning, we’ve already boosted end-user application performance by 20 percent, empowering our employees to work more effectively than ever. We see that IBM Power Systems servers and IBM FlashSystem storage provide the perfect platform for demanding new analytics workloads in SAP S/4HANA, which will help us enhance the efficiency and sustainability of our operations in the future.”

Business Impact
 

• Enables a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA, avoiding costly business disruption during the conversion. 
• 20% increase in end-user application performance for SAP S/4HANA, boosting operational efficiency.
• Projected to increase insight into business processes, helping Mondi identify opportunities to enhance environmental performance.
• 100% uptime from IBM Power Systems servers and IBM FlashSystem storage, ensuring 24/7 availability.
• Supports 9 TB/month data growth and allows rapid public, private, and hybrid-cloud scalability, facilitating business expansion.

For decades, digital technology has played a crucial role in Mondi’s ability to manage its world-spanning manufacturing and supply chain processes in a sustainable way.

“Mondi is striving to build a better world for future generations, and MAP2030 includes commitments such as making 100 percent of our products reusable, recyclable, or compostable, by 2025,” continues Rainer Steffl. “Harnessing our data will be key to help us run our facilities in an optimal way and achieve the objectives of MAP2030. For example, we use sensors in our manufacturing plants to monitor our waste-water treatment processes and maintain our high environmental standards.”

To help it capture, measure, and act on these data insights, SAP is a crucial platform for Mondi. With the launch of the next-generation ERP SAP S/4HANA, the company saw an opportunity to embed analytics more deeply into its decision-making processes. Mondi realized that real-time insights from SAP S/4HANA could help it to instrument and automate more of its critical workflows—launching its business to new heights of efficiency.

Rainer Steffl confirms, “We are confident that SAP S/4HANA is the optimal foundation to help us build toward our sustainability objectives—and we looked for a dependable platform for the new solutions.”

Because SAP is a crucial platform for the entire group, Mondi has relied on resilient and robust IBM Systems and IBM Storage technologies to support its systems for many years, delivered as a managed service by IBM.

“Almost all our operations depend on SAP business systems, and if anything interrupted our production system, trucks would start stacking up at the factory gates in hours,” explains Rainer Steffl. “For over a decade, we’ve relied on IBM Power Systems to support our SAP solutions, and the platform has never let us down. Based on our positive experiences with IBM POWER8®-based systems, we decided to use IBM POWER9™-based servers for our SAP S/4HANA environment.”

It was essential to transition to SAP S/4HANA without disruption. By combining two IBM Power® System E1080 servers with low-latency IBM FlashSystem 7300 storage—built with IBM Spectrum® Virtualize and including IBM Spectrum Insights—Mondi was confident it would gain high performance, reliability, and availability for the SAP solutions, and complete the move with no downtime.

“IBM Power Systems servers and IBM FlashSystem storage are the optimal combination for a mission-critical platform such as SAP S/4HANA—helping us to maximize the business value of our investment in the SAP solutions,” adds Rainer Steffl.

Based on the successful first phase of its digital transformation initiative, Mondi is preparing to move its global business units to SAP S/4HANA, laying the foundation for leading-edge digital capabilities and helping the company race toward its MAP2030 goals.

“We are now planning how best to incorporate the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA into our workflows,” comments Rainer Steffl. “For example, SAP S/4HANA will offer more real-time insight into our warehouse inventory levels, helping us to more finely align production schedules to logistics operations. We are also very interested in using SAP Fiori mobile apps to put key insights at managers’ fingertips, contributing to faster decision-making.”

Looking further ahead, Mondi is exploring Red Hat® OpenShift to help enhance the scalability and portability of its SAP workloads in the public, private, or hybrid cloud.

“We are currently trialing Red Hat OpenShift, which we think is a brilliant technology to gain the benefits of cloud while avoiding the risk of vendor lock-in,” Rainer Steffl explains. “With the Red Hat solution, we can potentially move our containerized workloads between cloud providers or on-premises platforms seamlessly, empowering us to optimize our environment and ensure cost-efficiency in the long term.”

For a seamless switch to the new in-memory SAP S/4HANA solutions, IBM helped Mondi create a high-performance platform based on IBM Power Systems E980 servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (link resides outside of ibm.com). IBM manages and operates Mondi’s SAP environment, and ensures regular geo-backups supported by IBM Cloud® Backup.

“Throughout our cooperation, IBM connected us with the global resources we needed to drive the work forward,” remarks Rainer Steffl. “It was particularly valuable to engage with the IBM Innovation Center for SAP® Solutions, and my team made several visits to Walldorf, Germany to receive expert assistance from the IBM and SAP teams.”

Although the COVID-19 pandemic raged during the project, IBM, SAP, and Mondi collaborated closely to keep work moving forward at full speed. In just eight months, Mondi had successfully moved its global paper bags business to SAP S/4HANA without impact on production systems.

“We appreciate sustainable partners who think in a similar way to us, and that is precisely the relationship we enjoy with IBM,” concludes Rainer Steffl. “By moving our global business to SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems and IBM FlashSystem storage, we will gain the data-driven insights we need to realize our sustainability goals.”

Headquartered in London, England, Mondi Group (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a multinational packaging and paper group employing 26,000 people at 100 production sites across more than 30 countries in Europe, Eurasia, North America, and Southern Africa. Mondi’s business is fully integrated across the value chain—from managing forests and producing pulp, paper, and plastic films, to developing and manufacturing effective industrial and consumer packaging solutions. In 2019, Mondi achieved revenues of EUR 7.27 billion and underlying EBITDA of EUR 1.66 billion.