Jabil Uses SAP HANA for Real-time Supply Chain Insights That Avoid Delays and Boost Satisfaction

[brian_silvestro]

As a global leader in global manufacturing solutions, Jabil’s batch processing of application workloads has always been a necessary evil, and somewhat of a headache. In our case, even a simple query to locate inventory could take eight hours or more to run, thanks to our 23TB Oracle database containing 450 million master material data elements, 16 million vendor data elements, and 7 million customer data elements.

With 90 plants in 33 countries and a highly dispersed staff of 180,000 employees, one of our greatest challenges is ensuring each and every order is shipped in a timely fashion. Not only do late orders contribute to customer turnover; they can result in fees that negatively impact our bottom line. With our legacy batch processing system, we routinely faced the risk that if employees ran a batch query to find vital inventory, the time it took to process the report often meant the information was outdated before it was delivered.

To address this bottleneck, Jabil implemented SAP HANA as a “sidecar” analytics accelerator for real-time inventory status and stock movements. Then our team did something creative — it replaced the 250 queries in the ECC with two “super” queries run through SAP HANA.

Jabil is using SAP HANA as a “sidecar” with greater intelligence. If the connection to the remote database is down, it is automatically redirected to the primary database, allowing queries to be executed in the timeliest manner. The system also generates an email to administrators notifying them of the redirection while identifying information so they could quickly track down the source of the issue.

After replicating more than a billion rows of data to SAP HANA, queries against our raw data in SAP HANA are now processed in an outstanding 1.14 seconds, roughly 25,000 times faster than when we ran that same query against our Oracle database.

SAP HANA provides Jabil with the real-time access to critical information that enables us to proactively manage our supply chain and production processes. These productivity gains translate into more on-time deliveries—which in turn translate into happier customers and greater profitability.

To learn more about us, visit our website at www.jabil.com