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Polynt prepares for ultra-competitive operations
Chemicals manufacturer targets tighter global integration with IBM
Polynt’s chemicals play a key role in many industrial processes, including electronics, logistics, maritime and more. Operating in a competitive space, the company strives to maintain high product quality while keeping tight control of costs.
Annamaria Codari, Global IT Director at Polynt Group, explains, “Polynt operates in 16 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and many of our sites have come onboard via mergers or acquisitions. We see a great opportunity to use our economies of scale by making it easier for our businesses to share information and collaborate on opportunities.”
Today, Polynt uses IBM Cloud®—managed by infrastructure experts from IBM®—to support its vital SAP ERP solutions for Europe and Asia. Thanks to the performance, scalability and cost-efficiencies of cloud, the company has laid the foundation for SAP S/4HANA, which will enable standardized processes and tightly integrated operations in the future.
Annamaria Codari confirms, “Since moving to IBM Cloud, we’ve slashed the time to provision new infrastructure. We can stand up environments in minutes, up to 78 percent faster than before. Most importantly, the cloud empowers us to focus on delivering new data-driven capabilities for the business, including our planned journey from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA.”
For many years, Polynt has relied on SAP ERP solutions to support its business processes, from factory floors to delivery depots. The company has three SAP ERP instances: one for its USA business, one for its Europe and Asia companies, and one for its Reichhold business. To sharpen its competitiveness and unlock cost-efficiencies, the company aims to move all its businesses to the leading-edge ERP SAP S/4HANA, beginning with its Europe and Asia operations.
“In the past, we used on-premises infrastructure for our Europe and Asia SAP ERP instance,” continues Annamaria Codari. “Although our previous IT platform had served us well for many years, the infrastructure was approaching end-of-life. As a result, we targeted a new solution to support the future transition to SAP S/4HANA.”
Polynt set out a list of stringent requirements for the new infrastructure platform. As well as offering rock-solid reliability, the company looked for a solution that would reduce the need for manual management and maintenance work—freeing its IT team to focus on the wider business transformation program.
Business impact
Up to 78% faster provisioning for IT environments, cutting time-to-market for new business services.
Eliminates manual management and maintenance of on-premises data center, reducing operational costs.
Enables a non-disruptive move to IBM Cloud and ongoing 24/7 management from IBM, shrinking business risk.
Delivers automated, cost-effective backups with IBM Cloud Object Storage, protecting vital data.
Offers seamless scalability, streamlining Polynt’s future move to SAP S/4HANA solutions.
Polynt began by evaluating offerings from leading cloud vendors. The company decided to use IBM Cloud bare metal servers as the foundation for its next-generation SAP business systems, and engaged migration services from IBM to achieve a smooth transition to cloud.
“We quickly determined that a private cloud would offer us maximum control over the configuration of our infrastructure, which is crucial to ensure both the smooth running of SAP ERP and to maximize the benefit of a future investment in SAP S/4HANA,” explains Annamaria Codari. “Of all the private cloud solutions we considered, we were most impressed with the IBM offering. The IBM team went out of their way to listen to our needs and propose a solution that met all our near- and long-term requirements.”
By selecting managed services from IBM, Polynt eliminates the need to maintain its on-premises infrastructure, enabling it to unlock significant cost-efficiencies by decommissioning its previous server and storage systems.
“Another factor in our decision to choose the cloud was the long-standing and positive collaboration between Polynt and IBM,” adds Annamaria Codari. “We have worked with IBM for more than 20 years, and in all that time we’ve found the company to be responsive, professional, and committed to our success.”
Based on the success of its move to IBM Cloud, Polynt is already planning for the future. For example, the company is currently using IBM Cloud Object Storage to deliver automated backups for its mission-critical data, stored at an IBM Cloud data center in Germany. Looking ahead, Polynt will engage services from IBM to enable a high-availability configuration, allowing the company to rapidly fail over to a secondary SAP environment in the unlikely event of an issue with its production systems.
The company is also continuing to optimize its bare metal servers, which will accelerate its provisioning process further still.
Annamaria Codari comments, “At the moment, we can spin up simple systems such as virtual machines within minutes, more complex environments within around an hour, and fully fledged SAP environments within around one working day. In the future, we are very confident that our optimizations to the IBM Cloud bare metal servers will empower us to speed up these processes further still—cutting time-to-market for new services for the business.”
By taking its first step into the cloud, Polynt is on the way to building standards-based processes and systems that will help it mobilize the full resources of its global businesses, and seize new opportunities ahead of competitors.
“By working together with experts from IBM, we made the move to IBM Cloud with zero disruption for our hundreds of users across Europe and Asia,” says Annamaria Codari. “In the present, IBM Cloud gives us the secure, performant and cost-effective platform we need to support our businesses effectively—and for the future, IBM Cloud offers the scalability to rapidly extend our environment to enable the move to SAP S/4HANA.”
Annamaria Codari concludes, “With IBM Cloud, we will be able to support a wide range of new, highly integrated business systems without sending the costs of infrastructure, governance, and maintenance soaring. By making this first move toward global business integration, we are confident that we are on a journey that will strengthen Polynt’s competitiveness, enhance the quality of our services, and help drive our business growth for years to come.”
Polynt (link resides outside ibm.com) is a specialist manufacturer and marketer of organic anhydrides and their derivatives. With more than 60 years of industry experience, the company provides a wide range of products for sectors including agro-food, biomedicine, construction, electronics, logistics, and maritime. Employing around 3,200 people, Polynt is headquartered in Scanzorosciate, Italy, and operates in 16 countries worldwide.
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