KT&G leverages eG Enterprise to get complete
insight into its SAP ERP landscape

At a Glance

Background

KT&G is a leading manufacturer and distributor of food and beverage products in South Korea and has expanded to become a large global organization. The company has also expanded into sectors such as the development, manufacturing and distribution of drugs, bio-tech drugs, non-pharmaceutical health supplements, medical goods, medical equipment, and other related products.

To keep its worldwide supply chains operational, KT&G relies on a large and sophisticated SAP ERP system which is used by over 4400 employees. Ensuring that employees can use the SAP systems to support the business effectively and without frustration is essential. Furthermore, as a responsible global enterprise operating in heavily regulated sectors - accountability, security and reliability are key features demanded from their IT systems.

KT&G's SAP landscape includes a large, recently upgraded SAP ERP system that includes multiple tiers with SAP ABAP systems, SAP Java systems, SAP Business Objects Enterprise nodes, SAP Web Dispatchers, SAP Routers and SAP HANA/MaxDB backend databases. AIX and Linux servers are used in the deployment.

KT&G's Challenges

• KT&G's IT team needed a comprehensive SAP monitoring solution for their newly built and enhanced SAP ERP system. They had found that the native SAP tools were insufficient for the end-to-end observability.
• The IT team needed monitoring for all the SAP ERP infrastructure tiers including SAP ECC, SAP SCM, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Netweaver Java and so on. A key requirement was for transaction monitoring of requests issued by users.
• As the SAP system is critical to business operations, the IT team is highly accountable to the business and needs to proactively avert user issues and resolve problems very rapidly. The ability to measure, report and demonstrate the team's success was a key requirement.
• The IT team is small and must have tools to help them be efficient and ensure 24/7 SAP ERP service continuity.

Why eG Enterprise?

• In 2022, KT&G performed an in-depth evaluation of many solutions including Splunk, Sherpa, Dynatrace, AppDynamics and eG Enterprise. They found that only eG Enterprise had sufficient capabilities to monitor all of KT&G's SAP ERP infrastructure, and provide insights on SAP transactions and user experience.
• KT&G's decision was also influenced by references of many successful eG Enterprise deployments for monitoring SAP in production in South Korea. Samsung SDS provided first-hand recommendation based on the benefits they had experienced by using eG Enterprise for SAP ERP.

Implementation

eG Enterprise was deployed on-premises and configured to provide end-to-end monitoring of SAP services. eG Enterprise's out-of-the-box metric thresholding, AIOps powered root-cause problem diagnosis and alerting ensure that if a problem occurs anywhere in the SAP landscape, the KT&G IT team is immediately notified. KT&G have also taken advantage of eG Enterprise's ITSM integration capability to ensure that alerts are also passed to the company's internal messaging system for instant notification.

In addition to the ready-to-go out-of-the-box dashboards and reports, KT&G has also leveraged the GUI-based extensibility features to add custom dashboards and reports. These dashboards and reports highlight several key SAP KPIs including SAP ABAP oData metrics, availability of SAP ABAP Instances, and user transaction response times. Automated daily reports on the performance of the SAP ERP system are now supplied to management and stakeholders in the business.

The ability of eG Innovations to deliver local language support and product customizations via the Seoul office staffed by local sales, technical and R&D staff is valued by KT&G.

Results

KT&G has seen many benefits from deploying eG Enterprise to oversee its SAP operations.

Benefits to the IT team:

• The team now has a comprehensive unified monitoring solution for SAP infrastructure systems and SAP applications - eliminating previous blind-spots.
• IT staff have instant access to application performance trends and visibility of the correlations and dependencies between the systems and the applications.
• Staff are now instantly alerted to slow or stalled transactions in SAP and have the tools to understand the true root-causes of problems and resolve issues rapidly.

Benefits for end users:

• The quality of the SAP ERP service has improved significantly since deploying eG Enterprise. The IT team is proactively addressing issues, eliminating performance degradations. Service disruption durations have also been minimized.

Benefits to the company:

• KT&G has seen a significant reduction in MTTR for SAP ERP system failures, leveraging eG Enterprise's AIOps capabilities.
• KT&G estimates that eG Enterprise will pay for itself in less than 3 years through human resources savings, by automating previously manual tasks and by reducing the time that IT staff spend investigating SAP performance and user issues.

About eG Innovations

eG Innovations is dedicated to helping businesses across the globe transform IT service delivery into a competitive advantage and a centre for productivity, growth, and profit. Many of the world's largest businesses, across different verticals, use eG Enterprise technology to enhance IT service performance, increase operational efficiency, ensure IT effectiveness.