Accelerating the automotive supply chain

UGN manufactures high quality acoustic, interior trim and thermal management products for the automotive industry in North America. The company combines the best in Japanese and European acoustical technology with cutting edge manufacturing processes to create cost-effective products that improve the driving experience for consumers.

In the fast-moving world of auto production, with its just-in-time supply chains, getting all the components together at the right time is crucial. That means downtime in any area can have a huge domino effect. Fujitsu has been UGN’s trusted IT partner for many years, using its private cloud to host Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Hyperion Planning, among other applications; however, the underlying legacy infrastructure was reaching end-of-life and prone to occasional downtime. UGN wanted to find a more scalable, stable and cost-effective platform.

The recently launched Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) environment was a perfect fit. The challenge was in managing a seamless migration without disrupting the business. Based on its existing relationship, and on Oracle’s recommendation, UGN chose Fujitsu to handle this project.

“We were looking for more stability and better performance without the downtime that had been an issue in the past. For example, read-only storage and firmware upgrades had caused disruption to our production environment, which can impact our customers,” explains Eileen Cusack-Marvel, Business Systems Manager, UGN. “Fujitsu had the knowledge of our company as well as deep Oracle experience, making it well placed to lead this migration.

Fujitsu created a parallel environment within OCI and then used the Carbonite migration tool to move data across, without disrupting the business. Following three months of planning, the switchover took place during a single weekend, ensuring a seamless transition. Now, over 500 users can access critical business applications, including OBIEE, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Hyperion Planning.

“It was a very smooth process – Fujitsu’s long relationship with Oracle and previous experience in deploying to OCI meant that it knew the pitfalls to avoid and could leverage best practice,” continues Cusack-Marvel. “We now have three dedicated servers within OCI that support development, test, and production for all core applications.”

The new, optimized application environment has increased performance by 25% while also improving stability – downtime is a thing of the past with a guaranteed SLA of 99.99%. That means UGN acoustic, interior trim, and thermal management products get to the right auto plant at the right time. Moreover, because there are no upfront infrastructure costs, it works out less expensive than the previous system: UGN could save $500k annually as a result.

In addition, a portal provides access to dashboards, which gives total visibility of operations and enables a detailed system monitoring for applications, databases, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, if UGN needs more capacity, it is simple and fast to provision new storage or compute power.

“For us, the biggest benefit is the increased stability and performance – it just runs better, which makes our employees more productive and more efficient,” concludes Cusack-Marvel. “Fujitsu has created an OCI application platform that is fit for the future, fast, and flexible. We look forward to continuing our journey together.”