Baldor Electric's Successful Integration and Cost Reduction with IBM Solutions
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Backup & Recovery
Applicable Industries
- Cement
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Warehouse & Inventory Management
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- Hardware Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Baldor Electric Company is based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and is a leading manufacturer of industrial electric motors, mechanical power transmission products, drives, and generators. As part of the ABB Group’s Discrete Automation and Motion division, Baldor sells its products worldwide to distributors and original equipment manufacturers in more than 70 countries. The company operates from 50 sales offices and warehouses in North America, and 26 offices serving international markets. It also runs 26 manufacturing sites in the U.S., Canada, England, Mexico, and China.
The Challenge
Baldor Electric Company, a global manufacturer of industrial electric motors, mechanical power transmission products, drives, and generators, faced a significant challenge when it acquired a major competitor. The acquisition brought with it approximately 200 heterogeneous stand-alone servers, running various operating systems and applications. This increase in server numbers and system complexity threatened to considerably increase IT costs. Baldor, which continually aims to reduce IT costs as a proportion of sales revenue, needed to integrate the two organizations as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible. The company also wanted to continue driving down operational costs in its virtualized SAP Business Suite software environment.
The Solution
Baldor decided to migrate its heterogeneous server environment to an IBM System z10™ Enterprise Class server. The company transferred its business systems and processes from the 200 acquired systems to just one z10 Enterprise Class server. This consolidation reduced the size of their data center by 50 percent, freeing up an area of about 3,000 sq. ft., and dramatically reduced the power and cooling requirements of their infrastructure. Following the successful implementation of the IBM System z10, Baldor installed a second System z server, an IBM zEnterprise 196 (z196). The company also upgraded the older of its two mainframes to a new IBM zEnterprise EC12 server. Baldor non-disruptively migrated its SAP Business Suite applications from the IBM System z10 Enterprise Class server to the IBM zEnterprise EC12 server.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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