Mohawk Industries boosts sales and cuts costs with SAP HANA and Red Hat

Carpeting and flooring company Mohawk Industries sought to expand its SAP HANA environment to deliver greater business value and support critical operations. To achieve this expansion, Mohawk sought a scalable, cost-effective, and supported platform. By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, a collaborative solution from Red Hat and SAP, as well as Red Hat Satellite, Mohawk has improved its infrastructure performance, management, and costs. As a result, sales representatives now have real-time access to data, and Mohawk has gained an effective foundation for future expansion of its SAP HANA environment.

Benefits

  • Improved reliability and performance of data and critical systems
  • Lowered costs by reducing infrastructure needed to support SAP HANA by 30%
  • Gained access to expert support to ensure IT environment stability and security

Expanding IT environment to support growth

Mohawk Industries sells US$8 billion worth of carpeting and flooring annually. To gain better insight into business performance and processes, the company deployed SAP HANA, an in-memory computing platform.

After establishing a proven, production-ready SAP HANA environment, Mohawk sought to optimize the platform’s use for greater return on investment by expanding the it beyond analytics and business intelligence reporting to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other critical workloads. However, expanding this environment to standardize and support additional workloads would be costly.

“The culture of Mohawk is to grow by acquisition,” said Richard Yan, enterprise architect for business intelligence at Mohawk Industries. “Every year we make new acquisitions, and every company we acquire has its own data warehouse and technology infrastructure. Having many disparate technologies is not cost-effective.”

In addition, the company sought better support for its IT environment. “We felt Red Hat was the only operating system vendor offering support that could keep up with our HANA strategy,” said Vince Zuk, Mohawk’s director of enterprise infrastructure architecture.

Choosing a collaborative infrastructure solution

To control costs while growing, Mohawk sought to replace its operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Most of the company’s staff were familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and many workloads already ran on Red Hat’s supported yet cost-effective platform.

When Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA received certification from SAP, Mohawk immediately began an infrastructure assessment to plan migration from its previous operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, built collaboratively by SAP and Red Hat, is optimized to meet SAP HANA’s unique requirements. Migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA would also let Mohawk standardize its global operations on a single Linux platform to reduce complexity.

To support this new environment, Mohawk deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On to automate failover and minimize service disruption to critical deployments. The company also deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux Smart Management Add-On to unify management of its Red Hat environments. This add-on provides integration with Red Hat Satellite, an easy-to-use management solution, to keep Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments running efficiently and securely. In addition, the add-on lets users group sets of systems and manage them centrally with Red Hat Satellite.

Supporting critical systems and capabilities

Improved reliability and performance

With Red Hat technologies, Mohawk has doubled its data processing performance. In addition, the Red Hat environment helps Mohawk support its most demanding workloads and scale to process and manage petabytes of data. As a result, the company can better meet its service-level agreements (SLAs).

“After a recent hardware issue, Red Hat Enterprise Linux successfully executed the failover,” said Yan. “Even though one of the servers in our cluster went down, we were able to continue working. The system responded as promised.”

With these improvements, Mohawk can better support its sales teams. Previously, the company distributed a weekly sales report spreadsheet. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA lets sales representatives access live data to make better, more informed business decisions.

Mohawk Industries

Industry

Manufacturing

Headquarters

Calhoun, GA

Size

34,000 employees, 18 offices worldwide

Software

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® for SAP® HANA®, Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Smart Management Add-On, Red Hat Satellite

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB It feels like Red Hat has a stake in our project. Red Hat isn’t selling us a solution, they’re selling us success.

Vince Zuk

Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture, Mohawk Industries

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB We only extend our investments when we see the benefit, and we’re continuing to see the benefit of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on SAP HANA. We’re moving anything and everything to SAP HANA, and Red Hat is leading that digital journey.

Vince Zuk

Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Architecture, Mohawk Industries

Cost-effective, simplified infrastructure

By standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, Mohawk has consolidated multiple SAP HANA environments. As a result, the company reduced the amount of infrastructure required to support SAP HANA by 30% and cut infrastructure costs.

Using Red Hat technologies has also helped Mohawk establish infrastructure that better supports its acquisition-based growth strategy by assimilating acquired companies faster and more cost effectively. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, Mohawk can expand its SAP HANA environment to consolidate data from acquired companies on less infrastructure at less cost.

Access to expert, hands-on support

With help from the Red Hat Support services included in its subscriptions, Mohawk can easily expand its Red Hat environment. Red Hat experts provide guidance on design and configuration settings to ensure stability and security.

“Red Hat’s willingness to work side-by-side with us is the kind of personal touch that was missing with our previous operating system vendor,” said Zuk. “It’s a personal relationship with people who understand what we’re trying to do and the business problems we’re trying to solve. It feels like Red Hat has a stake in our project. Red Hat isn’t selling us a solution, they’re selling us success.”

Supporting continued digital transformation

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mohawk has found technology to support its digital transformation. The company has extended its SAP HANA footprint beyond business intelligence — such as consolidating legacy data and SAP Business Warehouse — to ERP and other critical systems. Mohawk now has 42TB of data in SAP HANA and plans to add 8TB by the end of 2017.

“We only extend our investments when we see the benefit, and we’re continuing to see the benefit of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on SAP HANA,” said Zuk said. “We’re moving anything and everything to SAP HANA, and Red Hat is leading that digital journey.”

About Mohawk Industries

Mohawk is the leading global flooring manufacturer, with revenue of US$8 billion annually. Its products satisfy all remodeling and new construction requirements, and its brands include American Olean, Bigelow, Daltile, Durkan, IVC, Karastan, Lees, Marazzi, Mohawk, Pergo, Unilin, and Quick-Step. In the past decade, Mohawk has transformed its business from a U.S. carpet manufacturer to the world’s largest flooring provider.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device — SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 335,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.