Kaneka Concocts, Infrastructure Formula, With Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced at its .NEXT on Tour conference in Singapore that, in line with realizing Malaysia’s Industry 4.0 vision, chemical manufacturing giant Kaneka (M) Sdn Bhd. (Kaneka) has re-engineered its IT infrastructure with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

According to Kaneka, the company is enjoying an overall 35% increase in productivity, 83% lower power consumption and 91% greater efficiency in manpower deployment.

As one of the most developed chemical industries, Malaysia’s chemical sector enjoys an abundance of natural resources and has a supportive business environment.

But to increase competitiveness, chemical manufacturing companies like Kaneka have turned to improving their infrastructure to raise productivity and efficiency, which in turn translates into greater profitability. This is in line with Malaysia’s move to leverage the nine technology pillars under Industry 4.0 vision to transform the nation into a smart city which includes intelligent manufacturing as one of its features.

Kaneka has been operating in Malaysia since August 1995 and belongs to the Kaneka Corporation, an international chemical manufacturing company which produces products such as modifiers, expandable plastics and synthetic fibres.

Prior to implementation of the Nutanix solution, Kaneka had a legacy IT infrastructure that comprised of inefficient disparate systems which were expensive to maintain and difficult to scale up as IT requirements expanded. Working through the IT partner Virtuosity Solutions Sdn. Bhd., an IT assessment study was conducted which included interviews with top management and systems engineers on Kaneka’s operations and pain points.

“An IT assessment study has never been performed in Kaneka Malaysia but our investment on the study has definitely proven its worth,” said Ehtesham Ihsan, acting department head, Kaneka. “The subsequent detailed study done by our trusted and capable consulting partner allowed us to realise the value of IT Infrastructure’s role in driving overall productivity, and that helped us to make the decision to overhaul our systems with Nutanix as one of the core technologies.“

The study showed that Kaneka’s IT systems were not adequately protected against potential hardware or software crashes, system intrusions or datacentre outages. This could severely impact availability of its critical operations. Additionally, the IT systems were not standardized in deployment and operations, hence curtailing efficiency and greater business growth. New technologies were needed to re-engineer its entire IT operation.

The Enterprise Cloud Platform provided a converged and simplified infrastructure stack, as well as streamlined and simplified management operations. Thirty-four of Kaneka’s servers were migrated to the platform. Business critical applications that were running on legacy systems were virtualized including SAP, SAP SRM, SharePoint, HRMS and a couple of other proprietary mission critical systems to ensure better enterprise resource planning and operations. The entire implementation took four months to complete, as opposed to the typical six to eight months, without causing great disruption to day-to-day business operations.

Since the deployment of the systems on June 2017, Kaneka has seen multiple benefits. With Nutanix Prism, the centralized infrastructure management layer, it has reported a 91% reduction in IT support required and 477 man hours saved as less manpower was needed for maintenance. In addition, the Nutanix solution has resulted in a decreased footprint of 300 square feet as the number of physical servers required has been cut down by 15. The more efficient system has also led to 83% of reduction in power consumption. In particular, total cost of operation has reduced at an estimated RM1.5 million in 5 years.

“We’re pleased that our Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS has played a pivotal role in helping Kaneka greatly increase productivity and output,” said Matt Young, SVP and head of AsiaPac and Japan, Nutanix. “Kaneka’s Malaysia operations is a testbed for this infrastructure overhaul and based on its success thus far, we look forward to working with the rest of the Kaneka facilities in other regions in the not too distant future.“