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Group Mannheimer Versicherungen reduces operational costs by 30 percent
The root-and-branch review and restructuring of the Mannheimer IT landscape has more than met the business objectives, and has also delivered lower operational costs with improved technical performance, explains Norbert Koch, Managing Director of IMD.
Founded in 1879 in Mannheim, Germany, insurance group Mannheimer offers life, sickness and general insurance. The group companies employ 842 people in total, and generate an annual insurance premium income of around ?376 million (2009).
Mannheimer enjoys consistent business growth, fueled by specialist insurance solutions focusing on market sectors such as jewelers, artists and musicians. The company has relied on SAP applications to run its core processes for many years, including the specialist SAP Financial Services Collections and Disbursements and SAP Financial Services Re-Insurance components, as well as its own in-house and other non-SAP applications.
Group IT services are provided by an in-house company, IMD - Gesellschaft für Informatik und Datenverarbeitung mbH. Norbert Koch, Managing Director of IMD, explains, “We provide SAP systems and support for all the Mannheimer companies, and IMD itself is a wholly-owned subsidiary. “The existing HP and Oracle infrastructure could not scale reliably and cost-effectively to meet demand. In addition, we wanted to move to the
Winter 2010
current versions of the SAP applications as this would reduce license and support fees. We therefore chose to review the entire software and hardware landscape.
“IMD had to complete many changes with minimal disruption to the Mannheimer companies, which placed significant constraints on our project plans. The new solution also needed to allow us to complete system administration and maintenance without impacting daily business.”
Choosing IBM
The IMD team selected IBM to advise on the best way to progress with the transformation, including the introduction of Unicode, which was required for the upgrade to the most current versions of the SAP applications.
“IBM offers an excellent cross-brand value proposition, including hardware, software and services,” says Norbert Koch. “IBM presented three possible architecture solutions, any of which could be operated in-house or outsourced to IBM. This flexibility of approach suited Mannheimer, as it enabled us to choose the right course based on the business requirements rather than the technical specifications.”
Mannheimer chose to migrate all its SAP applications to virtualized environments on IBM Power Systems servers running IBM AIX, and to replace Oracle with IBM DB2. The project was initiated in May 2008, with the first hardware implemented in November. Database migration operations commenced in January 2009 and finished in February, followed immediately by SAP application upgrades that concluded in November. The SAP ERP applications were divided into test, development, quality management and production, all hosted on the IBM Power Systems servers.
The purpose behind the upgrade to the latest SAP ERP version and Unicode enablement was to move the company to a standard, current SAP
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