Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
Based in Azerbaijan, Tabaterra is a leading producer for some of the world’s most famous tobacco brands, including Pall Mall, Davidoff’s, Winston, and Sobranie cigarettes, as well as private brands such as Argo, Kingston, and Senate cigarettes. With a groupwide workforce of more than 1,600 people, the company serves some of the largest global companies in the sector, including Imperial Tobacco, British American Tobacco, and Japan Tobacco International.
To maintain its position as an industry leader, Tabaterra is constantly looking to boost manufacturing efficiency while ensuring high levels of environmental sustainability.
Challenge
Tabaterra has the capacity to produce up to 14 billion cigarettes every year and works with three of the largest tobacco companies in the world. The secret to the company’s success is its unwavering commitment to producing high-quality products made from some of the best materials using cutting-edge manufacturing techniques.
To support excellence across its operations, Tabaterra relies on mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to power its production planning, materials management, finance, quality control, and maintenance activities. Over time, the company found that its existing ERP solution—and the underlying infrastructure—was difficult to scale and no longer offered the robustness and reliability required to support future growth.
“Achieving excellence in everything we do is our core principle, which is why we are always looking for new ways to improve operations. As Tabaterra developed, we could see that our ERP solution and supporting infrastructure was ripe for improvement, especially if we were to support future business growth.” — Elman Javanshir, Director, Tabaterra
Why Lenovo? Superior Quality, Reliable Performance
To prepare for further expansion, Tabaterra decided to migrate its existing ERP system to the SAP HANA in-memory database, and selected Lenovo ThinkSystem, SR590, SR630 and SR650 servers, all featuring 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, and a Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000H Hybrid Storage Array to support the SAP solution.
“Gaining faster access to business data will empower us to embed industry best-practices more deeply into our operations, and forge stronger relationships with our partners,” comments Yagub Alizada, Head of Business Development at Tabaterra. “It’s also crucial that our ERP applications are available when we need them. By choosing Lenovo ThinkSystem solutions, we enable the reliability, scalability, and performance to support our growing business.”
Virtualized using VMware vSphere, the new platform runs the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications operating system and includes VMware vCenter Server management software, which is closely integrated with Lenovo XClarity, to help Tabaterra simplify system management and keep operations lean.
“Lenovo is a widely respected brand at Tabaterra—for example, almost everyone in the company uses Lenovo laptops. We trust Lenovo to deliver performant and reliable technology, which is why we chose ThinkSystem solutions to support our mission-critical ERP solutions.” —Yagub Alizada, Head of Business Development, Tabaterra
Going the Extra Mile
Tabaterra enlisted the support of Lenovo Deployment Services and Lenovo Hardware Installation Services to help design, configure, and deploy the new ERP infrastructure—helping to streamline the implementation. Working with Lenovo Deployment Services, Tabaterra implemented four Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 servers as SAP HANA database servers and three Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers as SAP ERP application servers.
Mr. Alizada comments: “Lenovo truly went above and beyond during the deployment of our new IT infrastructure. Because of the supply chain disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic we faced a significant delay in receiving one of the new servers. To keep the project moving at full pace Lenovo immediately stepped in and loaned us a server for no additional cost.”
During the deployment, Lenovo helped Tabaterra establish a backup environment to support disaster recovery. The Lenovo team worked closely with Tabaterra to implement a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR590 server and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000H Hybrid Storage Array with a DE120S storage expansion enclosure, powered by Veeam Backup & Replication software.
“Lenovo was genuinely interested in making sure that we built the most reliable, robust infrastructure we could,” says Mr. Alizada. “Lenovo’s recommendation of Veeam solutions and support architecting a brand-new backup infrastructure has helped us to strengthen our business continuity significantly, cutting our risk in the event of a disaster scenario.”
“With Lenovo by our side, we have the confidence to embark on the next phase of our business transformation. If any issues occur, we can rely on the Lenovo Services team to help us find a fast, effective solution.” —Yagub Alizada, Head of Business Development, Tabaterra
Results
As Tabaterra continues its rollout of SAP HANA, the company anticipates higher system reliability and scalability, as well as enhanced performance for mission-critical business applications.
“One of the major benefits of the Lenovo ThinkSystem solutions is that they just work,” says Mr. Alizada. “We don’t have to worry about carrying out extensive system maintenance or unplanned outages, which frees up time and resources for our IT team to focus on bringing digital innovation to our manufacturing operations.”
Looking ahead, Tabaterra plans to increase its integration with strategic business partners—fostering even greater efficiency through deeper collaboration.
“As we continue to grow our business, we look forward to working with Lenovo to build digital capabilities to help enhance our manufacturing processes and support the expanded enterprise.” —Elman Javanshir, CEO, Tabaterra
Elman Javanshir, CEO at Tabaterra, concludes: “Lenovo ThinkSystem solutions for SAP HANA are helping us to establish a cost-effective, easily scalable, and high-performance infrastructure that will help to drive the next stage of business process innovation at Tabaterra.”
- Boosts performance for key applications
- Improves availability and reliability
- Enables seamless scalability
- Reduces maintenance requirements