A Dollar Saved Is Two Dollars Earned. Over A Million Dollars Saved Is?

Radha Gowda, Technical Marketing, IBM Analytics

A refreshing new feeling because DB2 can offer your business 57% improvement in compression, 60% improvement in processing times, and 30-60% reduction in transaction completion time.

Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) was faced with severe business challenges: the rising cost of commodities and sharply higher fuel prices cannot be allowed to impact consumers of its world-famous sodas.  At the time of an SAP software refresh, the CCBCC IT team reviewed the company’s database strategy and discovered that migrating to IBM DB2 offered significant cost savings.  DB2 has delivered total operating cost reductions of more than $1 million over four years. And, DB2 10 has continued to be a compression workhorse, delivering another 20 % improvement in compression rate.

Staying competitive in a tough market

Andrew Juarez, Lead SAP Basis and DBA at CCBCC, notes:   “We happen to be in a market where we are considered an expendable item. In other words, it is not something that is mandatory. So we cannot push the price off to our customers to offset any losses that we may have, which means that we need to be very competitive on how we price our product.”

Making the move to IBM DB2

Tom DeJuneas, IT Manager at CCBCC, states:   “We did a cost projection, looking at the cost of Oracle licenses and maintenance fees, and calculated that we could produce around $750,000 worth of savings over five years by switching to IBM DB2. We also undertook a proof-of-concept phase, which showed that IBM DB2 was able to offer the same, and potentially more, functionality as an Oracle system.”

Moving from Oracle has brought about a significant change in the IT organization’s strategy, as Andrew Juarez explains:   “When we were on Oracle, our philosophy was that we did not upgrade unless we were doing a major SAP upgrade. If the version was stable, then we stayed on it. Now, with IBM DB2 our strategy has completely changed, because with every new release our performance keeps getting better and better, and the value of the solution continues to grow.”

Fast, accurate data

IBM DB2 manages key data from SAP® ERP modules such as financials, warehouse management, materials management and customer data.  Tom DeJuneas states, “Many of our background jobs and online dialog response times have improved considerably. For example, on the first night after we performed the switchover, one of our plant managers reported that jobs that normally took 90 minutes to run were running in just 30 minutes. This was simply by changing the database. So we had a massive performance increase in supply chain batch runs right from the get-go.”

Impressive cost savings

IBM DB2 has helped CCBCC to make better use of its existing resources, delaying costly investment in new hardware and freeing up more money for investment in other projects.

“Originally, when we did our business case for moving to IBM DB2, it was built around the savings on our Oracle licenses and maintenance, and that was it,” notes Andrew Juarez. “We did not factor in disk savings, so the fact that we are seeing additional savings around storage is icing on the cake. We had originally projected about $750,000 savings over five years and to date we are at four years and have seen a just over a million dollars in savings after migrating to IBM DB2. So we have bettered our original estimate by more than 25 percent.”

Tom DeJuneas concludes, “At CCBCC it is very important for us to stay on the frontline of innovation, and technology like IBM DB2 helps us to do that. Based on our experience, I do not see why anyone running SAP would use anything other than IBM DB2 as its database engine.”

Download CCBCC migrates to IBM DB2, saves more than $1 million for complete details.

For new insights to take your business to the next level and of course, cost savings, we invite you to try the DB2 with BLU Acceleration side of life.