Shree Cement Collaborates With IBM To Enhance Its Manufacturing Plant Efficiencies

* AIX and Red Hat on IBM POWER9 to simplify the IT infrastructure for the managed, private cloud environment

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a collaboration with Shree Cement Limited, one of the top three cement producers in India, to run their database and core business applications using AIX and Red Hat on IBM POWER9-based IBM Power Systems. Powered by IBM POWER9 servers, the implementation will allow Shree Cement to seamlessly enhance its productivity and bring in supply chain efficiencies across its manufacturing plants.

Shree Cement automated its key supply chain processes with Oracle Enterprise Command Center on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This shift helped the company optimize operational decisions, improve processes, bring in supply chain efficiency, drive better cost and revenue decisions. The company has also integrated a third-party IoT solution on the same platform to track manufacturing plant data such as in-plant logistics, supply chain processes involving the movement of raw materials and trucks from yards to plants, and monitor production efficiencies. 

The client refreshed its hardware from the existing Oracle-based servers and migrated to IBM POWER9-based IBM Power Systems S922 servers with higher per-core performance than the previous systems, designed to boost the infrastructure's performance by 2X from the existing setup. The servers ensure high security and availability of the application, even as the company adds capacity to handle new workloads. The company also implemented IBM FlashSystems 5100 Storage to gain a competitive advantage from its data assets and investment protection with the latest generation of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express) which delivers the highest throughput and fastest response time for all enterprise workloads. 

Manoranjan Kumar, Chief Information Officer, Shree Cement Ltd, said, "The company was in the midst of an expansion plan, and was looking for a dependable IT Infrastructure support that could deliver 24/7 capabilities, integrate operations, logistics, resources and export-import supply chain. The two operating systems, namely Oracle E-Business Suite on IBM AIX and Oracle Enterprise Command Centre on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, helped us move away from the vertical business approach. The new solution allowed us to operate horizontally across the company to bring in synergy amongst multiple manufacturing plants to drive business results and ensure business continuity even during the migrations."

Ravi Jain, Systems Leader, IBM India/South Asia added, "For any manufacturing plant, constant upkeep of the infrastructure and solution is a key priority. Building the right Information Architecture (IA) is crucial to Cloud and AI success. We helped Shree Cement develop their private cloud strategy for the IT infrastructure and seamlessly integrated Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power Systems. IBM Power Systems on the AIX platform is a secured and a scalable infrastructure which offers the flexibility to deploy mission-critical, data-oriented workloads across any environment." 

While migrating the client to IBM Power Systems, the IBM team considered Shree Cement's growth for the next three years, keeping in mind the scalability for future business expansion, ensuring maximum utilization of the hardware and saving the database software license costs. Besides, IBM Flash Systems 5100 provides a dashboard for usage and AI-driven alerts to reduce management and downtime costs. As part of IBM's Software-Defined Storage, Easy-Tier AI capability makes recommendations based on historical performance coupled with automation, transparent migration to the appropriate storage tier to improve the Storage system’s economics and performance. With IBM Storage technology, Shree Cement reduced data centre management costs with AI-driven insights. 

About Shree Cement

The world of Shree Cement is one without boundaries – changing and challenging every day. We make cement and through it we touch lives of millions of people every day. From the house you live in, the roads you to drive on, to the bridges you cross, we strive to deliver unparalleled quality through our customised products and value added solutions.