Cairn India Enhances Customer Service, Improves ERP Application Response Time by 68%
 
 

Cairn India Enhances Customer Service, Improves ERP Application Response Time by 68%

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Cairn India operates the largest producing oil field in the Indian private sector and has pioneered the use of cutting-edge technology to extend production life. Today, Cairn India has a world-class resource base, with interests in nine oil and gas blocks in India and one in Sri Lanka.

Cairn India sells its oil to major refineries across India and its gas to public and private buyers. The company was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange in January 2007 and is the fourth-largest oil and gas company in India with a market capitalization of more than US$12 billion. In 2011, Cairn India became part of the Vedanta Group, a globally diversified natural resources group with interests in aluminum, copper, zinc, lead, silver, and iron ore markets.

Cairn India deployed two SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers from Oracle and two SPARC servers replacing SPARC T2 Series systems, which had reached end of life. The servers run core ERP software and the Oracle Solaris 10 operating system in a clustered server environment provided by Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3. The company also runs Oracle Database.

“The SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers improved the ERP application response time by 68%,” said Udayveer Singh, manager, SAP-IT, Cairn India. “This helps us maximize productivity and enhance customer service while enabling our senior managers to make quicker business decisions.”

 
Complex Application Environment Requires Server Upgrade

A word from Cairn India

  • “SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers improved our ERP application response time by 68%. This helps us maximize productivity and enhance customer service while enabling our senior managers to make quicker business decisions.” – Udayveer Singh, Manager, SAP-IT, Cairn India

When Cairn India began operations in 2006, it deployed a SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage its financial reporting, inventory, procurement, production, oil and gas project management, human resources, employee self service, and joint venture management activities. This ERP system was running on 16 highly available SPARC servers at its data center in Chennai, India.

“Cairn India initially deployed a SAP human resources module, which was used by 127 staff,” said Singh. “By 2010, we had deployed several modules that were being used by more than 2,000 staff across the organization. We quickly realized that we needed to upgrade our server infrastructure to support our complex application environment and the rapid growth of our oil and gas exploration business.”

 
Customer Service Improved with Faster Application Response Times

 
Improved CPU Utilization Provides Room for Growth

 
Server Management Costs Reduced

 
Automatic Failover with Clustering

 
 

 
 

Challenges

  • Replace servers that were reaching end-of-life with new highly available systems that supported a complex application environment and growth in the company’s oil and gas exploration business
  • Improve application response times, so staff can work more productively and service customers faster
  • Reduce report generation time to ensure managers can access business information faster
  • Overcome CPU utilization bottlenecks that slowed down application performance
  • Reduce server acquisition and management costs
  • Protect core ERP systems from unexpected disruptions

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Enhanced customer service by improving the ERP application response time by around 68%
  • Enabled core software to respond in 600 to 900 milliseconds, compared to around 2,500 milliseconds on the previous systems
  • Processed around 7.1 million internal and external SAP dialog steps—needed to get from one screen to the next—each month
  • Made it easier for senior managers to make better business decisions by generating oil and gas extraction reports 60% faster
  • Eliminated CPU utilization bottlenecks that affected application performance
  • Ensured servers are running at 15% CPU usage, which provides plenty of room for future growth
  • Provided performance features to ensure the core ERP system runs smoothly
  • Deployed servers that are less expensive to maintain as parts for the new SPARC servers can be quickly replaced
  • Provided automatic failover capabilities that ensured ERP applications would stay online and data would not be lost following a server failure

Why Oracle

Cairn India has used Oracle SPARC servers since 2006. The SPARC Enterprise M5000 and other SPARC servers were chosen because they best suited the organization’s requirements of high availability and scalability.

“The new SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers are flexible and reliably support the core ERP applications that are crucial to the success of Cairn India,” said Singh.

“We see a big advantage in only having to work with one vendor when we need server and database support following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. We also did some research and found that Oracle has been the safe, reliable, and scalable database of choice for SAP customers. Oracle Database and database options are constantly optimized for SAP applications.

“CAIRN has also been using SPARC servers for six years; they are robust and provide the maximum value because they last a long period of time,” said Ganesh Radhakrishnan, head, SAP practice, Cairn India.

Implementation Process

Cairn India’s internal SAP-IT team began the deployment in December 2011 and switched on the new servers in March 2012.

During the implementation, the team of domain experts spent one month studying the organization’s requirements and drafting a plan. Cairn India also engaged Oracle Consulting to design the final system architecture.

Cairn India’s SAP-IT team completed five tests to ensure there were no technical and functional issues when the servers went live. The team completed similar tests with its business partners to ensure seamless data transfers between its applications and external online banking systems. It also tested the automatic failover capabilities to ensure the infrastructure would continue to run following a server failure.