Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
Founded in 1980 and headquartered in the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, China, Jide is a leading manufacturer of domestic appliances. Employing more than 1,000 people, Jide is one of the country’s fastest-growing manufacturers, with 100 sets of molding systems and an annual production capacity of one million washing machines.
For more than 40 years, Jide has been at the forefront of China’s manufacturing industry, producing high-quality washing machines, and delivering original equipment manufacturing (OEM) services for well-known domestic and international brands. With demand for its products on the rise in China, Jide aimed to capture the new opportunities by ramping up the speed and efficiency of its four production lines.
Challenge
In the past, Jide relied on manual processes to manage its manufacturing operations. At the end of each working day, an employee at each station would inventory the quantity of components produced, and then record the data in Jide’s ERP system. As well as making it difficult to ensure that each manufacturing station was on track to meet its daily targets, this approach limited Jide’s ability to identify production defects in a timely manner, increasing the potential for wastage and delays.
To help solve these challenges and achieve the long-term growth goals, the company targeted an advanced, data-driven approach to manufacturing management. The aim was to deploy leading-edge, computer-controlled molding machines, connected to and controlled by SAP business systems. The new way of working promised to offer fine-grained control over manufacturing processes, faster visibility of production defects, and real-time insights into operational performance, enabled by SAP HANA and SAP Manufacturing Execution.
Because the new SAP solutions would be integral to the day-to-day running of the business, the company looked for an IT platform that would minimize the risk of unplanned downtime. At the same time, Jide wanted a solution that offered the performance for demanding analytics workloads, and the scalability to support its continued business and data growth.
“Our new SAP Manufacturing Execution solution is mission-critical: if this were to go offline unexpectedly, it would cause huge disruption for the business. To keep our new data-driven business processes running smoothly 24/7, we looked for a provider that could deliver over 99.99% availability.”1—Zou Linxiang, CFO, Jide
Why Lenovo?
After reviewing several leading vendors, Jide selected Lenovo ThinkAgileHX and ThinkSystem solutions as the foundation for its new SAP business systems, running the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications operating system.
The new solution comprises two Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers for SAP HANA workloads, powered by high-performance 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, and an additional ThinkSystem SR650 server running SAP Manufacturing Execution. To support the company’s other SAP applications and development and testing environments, the company deployed four Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3321 Certified Nodes, also equipped with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
By using Lenovo XClarity and Nutanix Prism software, Jide can orchestrate compute and storage resources in a single pool, enabling fast, straightforward management, and seamless scalability. To ensure that vital business data is always protected, the company has provisioned a further three Lenovo ThinkSystem SR590 servers for data backup, with the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3321 servers acting as a cold standby system for SAP Manufacturing Execution.
“Of all the vendors we assessed, we were by far the most impressed with the quality of the Lenovo offering. We consider Lenovo a leader in the quality of their servers, and their strong local presence gave us confidence we’d receive the support we needed.” —Zou Linxiang, CFO, Jide
Going Live on Time
Working together with Lenovo, Jide achieved its aggressive targets for the deployment of the new infrastructure platform and the deployment, configuration, testing, and launch of the SAP solutions.
With the assistance of local Lenovo experts in SAP technologies—including the cutting-edge SAP HANA data platform—the company rapidly tuned the new IT infrastructure for maximum performance and availability. Today, Lenovo provides ongoing management and maintenance services for SAP HANA, helping to relieve pressure on Jide’s IT team and liberate personnel to focus on value-added activities.
“This was the largest IT project in our company’s history, and Lenovo played a key role in our success. Thanks to the infrastructure from Lenovo—powered by high-performance 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors—we have an IT platform that will support our data-driven initiatives for at least the next five years.” —Zou Linxiang, CFO, Jide
Results
With Lenovo systems at the heart of its new smart factory concept, Jide is driving up the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of its manufacturing processes—helping it to capitalize on valuable commercial opportunities in its domestic markets and beyond.
If defects occur in its just-in-time production lines, Jide temporarily halts production to repair the affected components. In the past, the company’s average line-stop rate was approximately 10%. Since the company went live with SAP Manufacturing Execution, it has slashed the line-stop rate to just 4%—contributing to lower operational costs and higher daily manufacturing throughput.1
Looking ahead, Jide plans to continue to build on its success by opening a brand-new production line, and extending the SAP Manufacturing Execution solution to all existing production lines. Lenovo will continue to support the company on its long-term growth journey, and Jide sees many opportunities for future collaboration.
- Enables data-driven manufacturing process, cutting line-stop rates from 10% to just 4%1
- Helps reduce operational costs while boosting production throughput
- Delivers >99.99% availability for mission-critical SAP solutions1
- Offers seamless scalability, helping Jide support future digital initiatives with ease
We are extremely pleased with the business outcomes of our collaboration with Lenovo, and we believe we have found a trusted partner to support us on our ongoing digital transformation journey.” —Zou Linxiang, CFO, Jide