Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
Based in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Sadina 99 is a family-owned business with more than 15 years of experience in manufacturing and exporting sunflower products. Operating in the biggest sunflower growing area in the country, the company’s state-of-the-art factories produce fresh sunflower kernels, which ship fresh to customers within just four days of processing.
Challenge
In under a decade, Sadina 99 has grown to become one of Europe’s leading suppliers of sunflower products, trusted by hundreds of clients across the baked goods and animal feed industries. To build on its success within its domestic and central European markets, the company is now setting its sights on international growth—and aims to expand its footprint to additional regions around the world.
Zahari Zashev, IT Manager at Sadina 99, explains: “Business expansion brings many opportunities for us to win new clients and boost our revenues—but it also brings challenges. Working in multiple geographies significantly increases the complexity of our business processes behind the scenes, including order and warehouse management, logistics planning, financial accounting, and more.”
In the past, Sadina 99 was able to manage its business successfully using older systems and processes. However, as its business continued to grow steadily into new markets and segments, it realized that it would be vital to find a more efficient way of working.
“Our ultimate goal is to scale up our business without dramatically increasing our headcount,” confirms Zahari Zashev. “We operate in an industry where margins are relatively tight, so controlling our costs in this way is extremely important to maintain healthy, profitable operations.”
To help realize its long-term growth strategy, Sadina 99 targeted integrated, data-driven business processes, enabled by SAP S/4HANA. The aim was to create a single digital platform to support the company’s end-to-end workflows: from manufacturing to delivery, and everything in between.
“We decided to replace our old software solutions because we simply outgrew them. We took on the challenge to upgrade our digital workflows with SAP S/4HANA as we knew the new SAP solutions would become mission critical. To ensure high availability—and to maximize the value of our investment in SAP—we looked for a robust, high-performance infrastructure platform.” —Zahari Zashev, IT Manager, Sadina 99
Why Lenovo? A Price/Performance Ratio That Outclasses the Competition
After reviewing several market-leading infrastructure solutions, Sadina 99 selected Lenovo as its preferred provider. The new solution is based on two Lenovo ThinkSystem SR550 servers with 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, connected to a Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000H Hybrid Storage Array and deployed in a high availability configuration.
Virtualized using VMware vSphere Essentials Plus, the new platform runs the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications operating system and includes Lenovo XClarity Administrator—empowering Sadina 99 to reduce the time and effort required for routine system management and maintenance.
“The Lenovo ThinkSystem solution—powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors—met all our key performance, scalability, and availability requirements for SAP S/4HANA. The SAP benchmarks for Lenovo ThinkSystem blew away the other providers we evaluated, and we were particularly impressed by the price/performance ratio of the Lenovo offering.” —Zahari Zashev, IT Manager, Sadina 99
Building a Future-Ready Platform
Working with a local team from Lenovo and Lenovo business partners Adroit Electronics and Ditaz, Sadina 99 designed, deployed, and configured the infrastructure platform, and prepared the new environment for the SAP installation.
“The local team from Lenovo was very responsive to our needs and helped us find the optimal solution for our new SAP business systems,” recalls Zahari Zashev. “The support we received from Adroit Electronics and Ditaz was also extremely valuable—the team was always on hand whenever we had a technical question or needed assistance.”
“Our solution implementation went smoothly, which gave us great confidence that we’d chosen the right IT infrastructure partner. All our Lenovo ThinkSystem solutions are covered by a 24-hour support contract, which gives us peace of mind that we’ll receive timely assistance if we ever need it.” —Zahari Zashev, IT Manager, Sadina 99
Results
By moving to integrated digital workflows with SAP S/4HANA, Sadina 99 is unlocking the operational efficiencies it needs to drive cost-effective expansion into new markets.
“Thanks to SAP S/4HANA, we are helping our employees to work more productively than ever,” comments Zahari Zashev. “For example, we have already accelerated key business reports by 75%1—contributing to faster, better-informed decision-making. Looking ahead, we’re confident that SAP solutions, running on Lenovo ThinkSystem infrastructure and Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, will make it easier to grow our business into new markets while keeping tight control over costs.”
With 128 GB of RAM per server and a total storage capacity of 8 TB, Sadina 99 has a platform with the headroom to meet its needs for years to come. The new solution has already cut the time to run vital data processes in half,2 and will scale seamlessly as the company’s business expands.
- 75% acceleration for key business reports, contributing to faster decision-making1
- 50% faster backups, reducing risk of data loss in a recovery scenario2
- Offers headroom and scalability to support years of business growth
“We are confident that our Lenovo ThinkSystem solutions and Intel Xeon Scalable processors will support our growing business for the foreseeable future. When the time comes to scale out our servers or procure new laptops and PCs, Lenovo will undoubtedly be our supplier of choice.” —Zahari Zashev, IT Manager, Sadina 99