Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH wanted to enable new, innovative business models across BLANC & FISCHER Family Holding. How could it accelerate the digital transformation of production facilities?

The company chose to optimize business operations by moving SAP Manufacturing Execution to SAP HANA® on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM Power Systems, IBM FlashSystem® and IBM Spectrum® Virtualize.

Millions of kitchen living spaces worldwide feature products from BLANC & FISCHER Family Holding companies: ARPA, the French specialist manufacturer of ovens, stovetops and hobs; BLANCO, focusing on water, sinks and taps; BLANCO Professional, with products for commercial kitchens and industrial suppliers; DEFENDI, the Italian gas component maker; and E.G.O., which supplies household appliance manufacturers.

Underpinning these companies, BLANC & FISCHER CORPORATE SERVICES, which includes Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH, provides IT and functional capabilities for the entire group.

Manfred Leistner, Director / Head of Technology at Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH, begins, “We want to provide customers with the full range of options via a single, easy-to-use e-commerce solution with a customizable product configurator. Enabling tighter integration across all group companies will facilitate new, advanced business models. To do that, we have to bring our businesses closer together. How could we take advantage of our strengths, and optimize products and processes across multiple business units?”

To benefit from standardization across platforms, the group is moving all its SAP HANA instances to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions (link resides outside of ibm.com). “As soon as Red Hat Enterprise Linux was certified by SAP for the IBM Power Systems platform, we started running SAP HANA production systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions,” remembers Manfred Leistner. “Thanks to close cooperation between different teams at IBM and Red Hat, we went into production operation with SAP HANA rapidly, and without delays.”

For Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH, being able to run Linux on IBM Power Systems is essential to keep attracting the brightest talent. “IT personnel, particularly younger employees, are very comfortable with Linux on IBM Power Systems, even if they have never used the platform before,” adds Manfred Leister. “It’s a major benefit for us that we can leverage deep knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux across different server platforms, as it increases flexibility and accelerates troubleshooting.” Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH attaches great value to Red Hat’s open source mindset, and benefits from a large community of administrators and developers that are familiar with the solution.

As next steps, the Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH plans to implement DevOps processes across all data center operations, using the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (link resides outside of ibm.com) and Red Hat Satellite (link resides outside of ibm.com) together with Red Hat Premium and IBM Platinum Business Partner SVA (link resides outside of ibm.com). Beyond that, the IT team is already looking for ways to further streamline deployment, looking at containerized application delivery based on the Red Hat OpenShift enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform. A strong proponent of both multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies, the IT team is exploring cloud options to optimize costs and increase flexibility even further.

The system performance gained by moving its mission-critical SAP Manufacturing Execution application to SAP HANA has had an immediate positive impact on the company’s production lines. For example, even basic steps such as printing labels are faster, which contributes to overall efficiency.

“The technology transformation to SAP HANA and Red Hat Enterprise Linux will enable us to scale manufacturing management from just three plants in Germany and Canada to additional manufacturing sites worldwide over the coming months,” remarks Manfred Leistner. “What’s more, as a result of the migration, we achieved 30 percent faster response times while using 50 percent fewer processor cores. This translates into substantial cost savings, enabling us to standardize more of our production facilities.”

The IBM POWER9™ processor-based servers offer significant performance benefits: “For certain workloads, we need 25 percent fewer processor cores with IBM POWER9 technology,” confirms Manfred Leistner. “This reduction helps to cut investment and operating costs, and the improved resource efficiency enables us to be more flexible when setting up test and development systems, making the business more agile.”

Running the complete SAP S/4HANA landscape on IBM Power Systems has proven to be a winning strategy.

“Our experience with SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems, IBM Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been very positive,” says Manfred Leistner. “The IBM infrastructure solution allows us to dynamically scale and reassign capacities based on demand in real time. This scaling capability supports our growth and helps us to keep up with new business requirements.”

When it comes to IT support, Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH has been impressed with the performance of the IBM and Red Hat teams. Manfred Leistner notes, “The Red Hat team has a real interest to learn about IBM Power Systems. It is a joy to work with people who want to learn, and really go above and beyond to resolve any glitches. It is very reassuring that we can always speak to a network of specialists with deep technical expertise at IBM and Red Hat.”

He continues, “We are on a transformation journey with IBM, SAP and Red Hat, and we are modernizing our business applications with SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA on IBM Power Systems with IBM Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Automation. We currently run 70 SAP application instances. Our goal is to reduce the number of systems and instances by 30 percent. By merging separate systems and standardizing on a single application platform for all group companies, we can cut costs and enable much closer integration between group companies and different business units.”

Manfred Leistner concludes, “Tight integration of planning, manufacturing and business processes, as well as operational data, supports our digital reinvention efforts. With the SAP and IBM solutions in place, we can develop and launch new business models, ready for a more connected future in the kitchen, the factory, and beyond.”

Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the central IT service provider to the BLANC & FISCHER Family Holding (link resides outside of ibm.com), which shapes kitchen living spaces worldwide. Multiple group companies are part of the Family Holding including E.G.O-Group, BLANCO-Group, BLANCO Professional-Group, ARPA and DEFENDI-Group. The companies employ about 8,300 people worldwide in 23 countries and at 56 locations. In 2019, the group recorded a turnover of around EUR1.2 billion.

SVA (link resides outside of ibm.com) is one of the leading system integrators in Germany, specializing in providing data center infrastructure and implementation services.