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Success story: Hubbell

Success Story

KPI's:

  • Reduced data storage and hosting costs
  • Faster user queries for online and archived data
  • Faster backup of SAP systems
  • Simplified upgrade to new SAP systems and databases
  • Reduced risk with secure storage of retained data

Revenue:
$3.67 billion

Employees::  
> 19,700

Products & Services:
International Manufacturer

Headquarters:
Shelton, CT, USA

Business Need

Hubbell Incorporated, an international manufacturer of quality electrical and electronic products since 1888, had grown for over a century through acquisition. This left the company with many legacy systems across its many business units. To increase efficiencies and lower costs, the company wanted to standardize its systems and use one solution so they could have a single source of truth across the organization. The company decommissioned it 18 legacy systems and moved onto a global single instance of SAP in 2006.

With many products and business units running on the same SAP system, the company quickly found that transactional data was growing rapidly. Hubbell estimated that the system would reach 3 TB of data in less than 2 years. This amount of data would be very costly as the company’s SAP instance was outsourced. The company was therefore billed for each GB of data storage. They were also billed for the length of time necessary to do system back ups, which was growing longer as the system’s data volume grew. In addition, business users, who were used to running queries quickly against the legacy systems found that their query response time in SAP systems were much slower than expected.

The company decided it needed to start archiving right away to improve performance and lower the total cost of ownership of its outsourced SAP systems.

Solution

The company turned to Serrala to devise a data management strategy. The solution leveraged Hubbell’s existing SAP system infrastructure and storage and Serrala consultants helped Hubbell implement data archiving to reduce data volume. The solution included:

Standard SAP archiving objects
PBS archive add ons
PBS ContentLink
Phase one was completed in 2007 and focused on archiving data from the areas with the company was experiencing the largest data growth: MM, FICO, and iDocs. Subsequent phases focused on archiving data for other areas. Phase two (2008) focused on sales and billing data. Phase three (2010) focused on archiving master data. Phase four (2012) focused on archiving BI data.

Results

The company experienced immediate benefits from archiving. It was able to keep data under the 3 TB limit and enable:

  • Reduced data storage and hosting costs
  • Faster user queries for online and archived data 
  • Faster backup of SAP systems
  • Simplified upgrade to new SAP systems and databases
  • Reduced risk with secure storage of retained data

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