Carlisle Construction Materials

Vision

Surveying the current landscape

Fast-growing organizations are constantly searching for better ways to control and manage their equally growing stores of data volume. Every business minute, every business transaction, data multiplies tenfold.

As a diversified manufacturer and leading supplier of premium building products, Carlisle Construction Materials meets the demands of two all-encompassing markets: residential and commercial. The company manages their product lines and services through their complex SAP ecosystem. Due to the company’s rapid development, multiple customer channels and diverse offerings, Carlisle processes massive amounts of data daily.

With the rising volume of data and declining speed of Carlisle’s systems, it was time to take action. The Carlisle team turned to us to assess their options. After consulting with the company’s long-term managed services partner, the Carlisle team decided to demo their environment in an SAP S/4HANA Proof of Concept Lab, complete with an SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) upgrade and Business Objects (BOBJ) install.

Test driving Carlisle’s system within an SAP S/4HANA environment would allow for tangible performance metrics and data management insight. The BW upgrade was a guaranteed approach for speeding up the entire solution and delivering a compelling return on investment. A BOBJ install would allow for better overall reporting and in-detail analysis.

‘NTT has been Carlisle Companies’ trusted hosting and managed services partner for many years’ affirms Jon Sigmon, Vice President of Information Technology, at Carlisle Construction Materials, Inc. ‘Throughout our experiences, we have been very pleased with the NTT team’s performance and responsiveness.

‘We contracted NTT for both a BW upgrade and an SAP S/4HANA Proof of Concept. During the project, the team’s customer responsiveness went above and beyond the “standard” vendor role.

Transformation

Laying down the groundwork

After initial planning and roadmapping discussions, the first step was to migrate to the new BW system. During the initial phase of the BW migration, our team discovered that much of the data could indeed be cleaned up. Our SAP-certified delivery team worked with Carlisle to analyze and consolidate the database prior to compression. From there, we implemented the BW migration a second time. Alongside the migration, the team performed the BOBJ install.

Results

The standing solution

The results from the POC lab, upgrade and install paved the way for better visibility into dashboards and reporting, more insightful real-time analytics, and overall enhanced operations. The end solution proved to be six times faster than the previous system.

Faster operations translate into higher productivity. Better analytics equates to stronger business decisions. But most significantly, Carlisle is reaping their return on investment, making the sometimes grueling process worth every step along the way.

‘Our key takeaway from this project was the complex nature of an SAP S/4HANA implementation. NTT’s consultants were very seasoned and took the time to explain all of the steps as we proceeded with the project. We really benefited from having a company with SAP S/4HANA POC experience on board for the project. We have been very happy with NTT as a partner, and we will continue to work with NTT on other projects in the future.’