Oracle Customer Success — Nippon Paint Holdings Co., Ltd.

Nippon Paint Holdings Supports Global Expansion with Oracle Engineered Systems

By consolidating multiple servers and storage onto Oracle SuperCluster M7, we gained a high performing and scalable platform to improve our competitive edge and support global growth. Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance also helped us to ensure continuous operations and improve service quality.

— Kenichi Kanbara, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, IT System Planning Division, Information Systems Department, Nippon Paint Holdings Co., Ltd.

Nippon Paint Holdings Consolidates Group Companies’ IT Infrastructure to Ensure Continuous Operations and Reduce Maintenance Costs

Through consolidation of overseas joint ventures, Nippon Paint Holdings Co., Ltd. has become the number one paint manufacturer in Asia. By leveraging its 136 years of experience, Nippon Paint Holdings offers one-stop solutions for paint and surface treatment that suits almost all types of applications, including cars, vessels, machineries, road surface markings, and houses. It has a strong presence in China but also operates in other countries, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

To become one of the world’s top three paint makers, Nippon Paint wanted to optimize system performance and support continuous growth by integrating the IT infrastructure for the entire group into a single platform.

Challenges

Support overseas expansion strategy by standardizing the infrastructure for domestic group companies to improve the performance and reliability of its SAP accounting system and other Java-based enterprise applications running on Oracle WebLogic Server, including sales, production, and logistics
Ensure uninterrupted paint manufacturing business in Japan by reducing downtime for database backups across various time zones
Strengthen governance for overseas group companies by quickly collecting and analyzing useful information and enabling users to create timely reports and support decisions for group management

Results

Improved operating efficiency by consolidating five database servers, five application servers, and one large storage system onto Oracle SuperCluster M7 and accelerating the data loading time by 5x—from 2GB per second to 10GB per second—with Oracle’s InfiniBand technology
Gained a highly available IT infrastructure to support the needs of all overseas group companies in multiple time zones by using Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance’s incremental-forever backup architecture to transmit the changed data only instead of full backups and minimizing service interruption

Improved the ability to quickly process overnight batches for key enterprise applications without delaying to the next business day by achieving the optimal balance of all database workloads with the world's fastest Oracle’s SPARC M7 processor
Supported business demands by quickly recreating the database at any point of time instead of the slow traditional process of restoring a full backup, enabling the company to easily test and make changes to large scale applications
Built a foundation to provide powerful analytics with useful insight and achieve business goals by using Oracle solutions to rapidly process large volumes of data from group companies without the hassle of tuning, enabling users to access timely and accurate management information and perform various kinds of analysis in the future
Reduced maintenance workload and costs by using Oracle SuperCluster M7 to build a single infrastructure platform for all domestic subsidiaries and to ensure compatibility of applications
Provided flexible and reliable service for the group companies by using Oracle Solaris’ virtualization feature to easily change system resources, such as CPU and memories, allocated for each virtual machine and optimize system performance
Supported business expansion by providing extra capacity to accommodate increasing data volume from the enterprise applications without affecting performance
Completed the database migration for SAP applications to the new platform in less than two months and met strict project timeline, thanks to the Oracle to Oracle service with Oracle Advanced Customer Support and Oracle Partner, SCSK Corp.

Only Oracle SuperCluster M7 provided both servers and storage in a single platform and achieved 700x faster processing speed in the test, giving us confidence that the system could support our growth. We were also impressed with the unique backup architecture of Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance.

— Kenichi Kanbara, Manager, Infrastructure and Applications, IT System Planning Division, Information Systems Department, Nippon Paint Holdings Co., Ltd.

Execution

After conducting testing and evaluation, Nippon Paint Holdings implemented Oracle SuperCluster M7 and Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance to build an integrated IT platform due to its superior performance. With assistance from Oracle Advanced Customer Support and Oracle Partner, SCSK Corp., the company took only 1.5 months to migrate the database for SAP applications to Oracle.

About Nippon Paint Holdings Co., Ltd.

Headquarters

Osaka, Japan

Employees

16,498

Annual Revenue

US$4.7 Billion

Nippon Paint Holdings Co., Ltd.

Founded in 1881, Nippon Paint Holdings was the pioneer of paint manufacturing in Japan. Today, it is the largest paint manufacturer in Asia, providing not only paints tailored to customer needs but also high-quality coating systems for surface treatment. To increase its competitiveness and support growth, Nippon Paint Holdings expanded its businesses to overseas markets, including Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Partners

SCSK assisted Nippon Paint Holdings to deploy Oracle SuperCluster M7 and Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance for its IT infrastructure project. SCSK spent two weeks to test and verify the system performance and ensured that the solutions met Nippon Paint’s business requirements.

“We appreciate SCSK’s professionalism and flexibility. Their open-minded attitude also helped to quickly fulfill our needs and maximize the benefits of Oracle Engineered Systems,” Kanbara said.