Growing the business, protecting the planet
With the popularity of online retail growing steadily, the need for last-mile delivery packaging is also rising year after year. To capitalize on these opportunities and hit its own stringent sustainability objectives, Mondi Group engaged infrastructure experts from Kyndryl to help it build a robust, high-performance platform for the next-generation ERP SAP S/4HANA. The new solution—managed and maintained by Kyndryl—will allow Mondi to unlock new efficiencies even as business volumes grow, helping to meet its sustainability goals.
Steering global operations with data
With millions of consumers shopping online and on mobile each year, global use of single use packaging for last-mile delivery has soared. For leading packaging manufacturer Mondi Group, protecting the environment and sustainability are top priorities, and the Mondi Action Plan 2030 (MAP2030) is a key enabler of the company’s climate action response.
MAP2030 includes ambitious targets for improving company efficiency, to ensure the lowest possible production wastage, streamlined business operations, and super-efficient logistics. To enhance the integration between its worldwide operations and unlock new decision-making insights for MAP2030, Mondi looked to its trusted SAP solutions and infrastructure experts from Kyndryl.
Rainer Steffl, CIO at Mondi Group, says, “In partnership with Kyndryl, we converted 40 factories across 15 countries to the cutting-edge SAP S/4HANA platform—and the move went perfectly. Although our journey is just beginning, we’ve already boosted end-user application performance by 20 percent, empowering our employees to work more effectively than ever. We see that Kyndryl is the perfect infrastructure partner to support our demanding new analytics workloads in SAP S/4HANA, which will help us enhance the efficiency and sustainability of our operations in the future.”
“Working with Kyndryl to move to SAP S/4HANA was one of the smoothest projects I’ve ever been involved with. Even though we were contending with the impacts of COVID-19 throughout the engagement, Kyndryl mobilized its full global resources to help us stay on track and go live on time.”
- Rainer Steffl, CIO, Mondi Group
Committed to a better world
For decades, digital technology has played a crucial role in Mondi’s ability to manage its world-spanning manufacturing and supply chain processes in a sustainable way.
“Mondi is striving to build a better world for future generations, and MAP2030 includes commitments such as making 100 percent of our products reusable, recyclable, or compostable, by 2025,” continues Rainer Steffl. “Harnessing our data will be key to help us run our facilities in an optimal way, and achieve the objectives of MAP2030. For example, we use sensors in our manufacturing plants to monitor our waste-water treatment processes and maintain our high environmental standards.”
To help it capture, measure, and act on these data insights, SAP is a crucial platform for Mondi. With the launch of the next-generation ERP SAP S/4HANA, the company saw an opportunity to embed analytics more deeply into its decision-making processes. In particular, Mondi realized that real-time insights from SAP S/4HANA could help it to instrument and automate more of its critical workflows—launching its business to new heights of efficiency.
Rainer Steffl confirms, “We are confident that SAP S/4HANA is the optimal foundation to help us build toward our sustainability objectives—and we looked for a trusted partner to help us on our journey.”
Choosing a trusted platform
Because SAP is a mission-critical platform for the entire group, Mondi must ensure its solutions are available to global business users around the clock. For many years, the company has trusted infrastructure experts from Kyndryl, formerly IBM® Infrastructure Services, to deliver resilient systems, storage, and networking capabilities for its SAP environment.
“Almost all our operations depend on SAP business systems, and if anything interrupted our production environment trucks would start stacking up at the factory gates within hours,” explains Rainer Steffl. “For more than a decade, we’ve relied on managed services from Kyndryl to support our SAP business systems, and Kyndryl has never let us down.
Based on our positive experiences with Kyndryl, we decided to engage their help in moving to a new SAP S/4HANA environment.”
It was essential to transition to SAP S/4HANA without disruption. To ensure it could complete the move with no downtime while offering high performance, reliability, and availability for the new SAP solutions, Kyndryl designed a high-performance platform based on IBM Power Systems servers and low-latency IBM FlashSystem® 7200 storage.
“We were confident that the architecture that Kyndryl proposed would help us maximize the business value of our investment in the SAP solutions,” adds Rainer Steffl.
Ready to scale in the cloud
Based on the successful first phase of its digital transformation initiative, Mondi is preparing to move its global business units to SAP S/4HANA, laying the foundation for leading-edge digital capabilities and helping the company race toward MAP2030.
“We are now planning how to incorporate the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA into our workflows,” comments Rainer Steffl. “For example, SAP S/4HANA will offer more real-time insight into our warehouse inventory levels, helping us to more finely align production schedules to logistics operations. We are also very interested in using SAP Fiori mobile apps to put key insights at managers’ fingertips, contributing to faster decision-making.”
Mondi is now working with Kyndryl to explore Red Hat® OpenShift. The solution has the potential to enhance the scalability and portability of Mondi’s SAP workloads in the public, private, or hybrid cloud.
“We are currently trialing Red Hat OpenShift, which we think is a brilliant technology to gain the benefits of cloud while avoiding the risk of vendor lock-in,” Rainer Steffl explains. “With the Red Hat solution, we can potentially move our containerized workloads between cloud providers or on-premises platforms seamlessly, empowering us to optimize our environment and ensure cost-efficiency in the long term.”
Long-term partnership
For a seamless switch to the new in-memory SAP S/4HANA solutions, Kyndryl helped Mondi create a high-performance platform based on IBM servers. Kyndryl manages and operates Mondi’s SAP environment, and ensures regular geo-backups supported by IBM Cloud® Backup.
“Throughout our cooperation, Kyndryl connected us with the global resources we needed to drive the work forward,” remarks Rainer Steffl. “Kyndryl is incredibly responsive, and we never have to wait around for contract modifications or escalations when there’s something we need. We greatly look forward to continuing our close partnership as we move forward with the next stage of our move to SAP S/4HANA.”
Although the COVID-19 pandemic raged during the project, Kyndryl, SAP, and Mondi collaborated closely to keep work moving forward at full speed. In just eight months, Mondi had successfully moved its global packaging business to SAP S/4HANA without impact on production systems.
“We appreciate sustainable partners who think in a similar way to us, and that is precisely the relationship we enjoy with Kyndryl,” concludes Rainer Steffl. “By moving our global business to SAP S/4HANA—managed and maintained by Kyndryl—we will gain the data-driven insights we need to realize our sustainability goals.”
October 2021
