The supplier of spare parts replaced SAP worth $15 million with "cloud"

The supplier of automobile spare parts, Inteva Products LLC company (USA) replaced expensive ERP from SAP with a cloud system. The director of the department of information science of the company considers that it saves the head of the ERP project from need to deal with a set of technology processes.

Having left the structure of big holding, the Inteva Products LLC company inherited the IT equipment for functioning of an ERP system of the company. All production divisions of Inteva, engineering objects and the headquarters worked at several standalone servers, to each of which was from five to eight years. The CIO companies Dennis Hodges spoke of the system existing then, as about quite difficult for ensuring its stable work and installation of patches.

This period in 2008-2009 was quite critical for the new company. 8 thousand her employees in 18 countries depended on data of a corporate ERP system so the enterprise was faced by the choice: implement internal infrastructure for a SAP product for $15 million or go to "cloud".

Inteva did not receive from the parent company of any employee of category IT, and its CIO should employ all personnel of support of infrastructure and applications. "We made a logical choice and selected a cloud", - Hodges comments.

It is a step, according to him, saved Inteva of 25% of means, in comparison with costs for upgrade of the existing equipment and an overhaul of infrastructure "Transition to the virtualized servers at that time was already rather usual, and here transitions to cloud ERP systems were not", - he added. For belief of the management he adduced positive arguments, the including fixed monthly payments, lack of need of hardware upgrade and permanent latest versions of corporate applications.

The management of the company expressed concern about performance and security of SaaS technologies (software-as-a-service) and also the plan of disaster recovery. Hodges focused the attention on these two points when choosing provider of services. Search led it to the Plex Online Cloud ERP service of Plex Systems company intended for service of production companies.

Before migration from a legacy ERP system, Inteva and Plex through joint efforts transferred basic data and also a part of these transactions of the company. Inteva made a choice for benefit of the step-by-step approach, collecting data of a feedback at deployment of each website afterwards to use them at start. "Instead of integrating at once thousands of suppliers, we did everything small parts to test and use the best of what was learned", - Hodges emphasized.

Thus it was succeeded to minimize influence of the made mistakes. According to Hodges, he gave to an implementation team of ERP the chance of immediate correction of a rate after in the course of implementation the group came to a conclusion that something goes not so.

Within 12 months the joint Inteva/Plex command completed transfer of 14 platforms to cloud ERP. In January Inteva added users of the Body Systems company purchased by it. According to Hodges, the SaaS model considerably facilitated this task.

As well as company executives asked, Hodges constantly controls fault tolerance of ERP as main application of the company. At the same time it provides its high performance, the plan of disaster recovery and the corresponding mode of security. Colleagues warned Hodges about difficulties of input and output of data from the SaaS system, but it had no problems: every night it loads data for integration into other corporate applications.

Hodges reviewed the IT concept for Inteva. For example, instead of managing network with participation of system administrators, it has a system of analytics and the reporting under the data warehouse. It should not know infrastructure, the equipment and the operating system. "For the best business management and cost reduction it can focus on use of the analysis", - Hodges considers. According to him, for CIO, "cloud" – chance to understand a difference in business management and to avoid permanent checks of the connected cables.