Biral AG

The Client

Founded in 1919, Biral AG, based in the Swiss town of Münsingen near Bern, has 180 employees and is a leading manufacturer of pumps for domestic, municipal and industrial applications. Biral develops intelligent solutions that focus on customer benefits - simple, efficient and sustainable.

The initial Situation

As part of the restructuring and replacement of hardware, operating systems and virtualization in the data centers, the costs, performance and availability of all previously existing systems were put to the test. The aim was to significantly reduce annual maintenance fees and operating costs. In addition, the performance, availability and degree of automation of the systems were to be improved within a fixed new procurement budget. The existing licensing of all systems, especially those with high annual support costs, was also to be examined for possible optimization and consolidation options. The ERP system from Biral, as the heart of the production of the traditional Swiss manufacturer, was intensively examined for this purpose independently of all other applications and products.

The Solution

In the first step, the existing environment was analyzed in detail. Both the pure Oracle license costs and the overall operating costs were analyzed. It quickly became apparent that the maintenance effort of the solution in use was too high, that there was no high availability and that the licensing model of the database was disadvantageous for Biral. In a subsequent step, a new orientation of the Oracle database operation was therefore developed. Based on the level of knowledge of the internal staff, the new solution was simplified and at the same time designed to be highly available. A cloud-based web interface of all important components of the solution now encapsulates the underlying technology for IT and business. Two Oracle Database Appliances with a standby database solution were used for this.

The Benefit

By changing the licensing model, Biral can also use the Oracle database environment for other applications, such as CRM or the financial system, and thus save on database licenses elsewhere. Due to the high degree of automation of the new solution, the ongoing installation, maintenance and operating costs could be reduced by a double-digit percentage. This also eliminated the need for a 24/7 service contract, which also significantly reduces support and operating costs. In the event of a failure of the productive system, Biral can independently switch to a second system via the web interface. A large part of the manual rework after a system restart is now eliminated or could be automated thanks to the new configuration. The performance of the ERP application at the user interface was increased by 10-15 percent. The ERP application server determines the maximum possible increase in speed and does not allow more than 10-15 percent. Pure database processes benefit from even higher performance gains.