Bangkok Glass calls in Japanese ABeam Consulting for SAP-HANA roll-out

Bangkok Glass, the manufacturing conglomerate has brought in the Thai arm of Japanese consulting firm ABeam Consulting to renew its mission-critical systems.

The consulting firm has worked on the systems for the past 14 months across nine of Bangkok Glass’s Thai subsidiaries. Bangkok Glass is one of the largest glass packaging manufacturers in Asia producing bottles, glass plains & other packaging products. ABeam has worked with the manufacturing company to implement a new mission-critical system using the SAP-HANA platform.

ABeam completed the implementation of the system in March this year and will continue to support the rollout of the system across other units in the future. The system integrated a number of mission-critical functions including accounting, production and logistics across a unified IT infrastructure. With these integral processes safeguarded, the use of SAP Fiori allows users to access the system from multiple channels and locations.

ABeam Consulting has supported Bangkok Glass from the beginning of the project until its successful implementation. The consulting firm has also been involved through the process of concept planning and requirement definition to business process design, system operation and, lastly, operation migration.

SAP enterprise resource planning solutions are part of the Tokyo-based consulting firm’s main business areas and ABeam has strong ties with SAP Japan. They have over 4,000 SAP consultants globally who have a unique methodology and templates, and extensive experience in SAP execution. Aside from IT implementation and operation consulting, the firm also provides management and strategy consulting services.

The critical missions system standardises business processes and unifies the IT infrastructure across all of Bangkok Glass’s facilities. Prior to the move, these systems were stand alone and spread across all of its offices. The system itself is a SAP next generation enterprise resource planning business suite called SAP-HANA which aims to improve day-to-day functioning of the business.

SAP-HANA stands for ‘high-performance analytic appliance’. The system runs on an in-memory computing platform which helps organisations reduce both the hardware and maintenance costs of data storage. It collects analytical and transactional data from multiple Bangkok Glass facilities and categorises, analyses and stores the data sets.

The previous system was upgraded as the company is currently scaling up production and looking to expand in the future. With continued growth, the firm’s business processes had become scattered and individualised across each facility. Through integration, the company hopes to save operational time and reduce costs. According to SAP, an organisation can save up to 37% of costs when they use HANA across software, hardware and labour expenditure.