Star Cosmos Competes by Adopting Smarter Manufacturing with SAP on AWS

Over the last 15 years, Indonesia’s middle class has grown from 7 percent to 20 percent of the population, with 52 million Indonesians now belonging to the middle class. The robust income growth of this population segment has translated into strong consumer demand, with increasingly brand-conscious consumers having far greater access to a wide assortment of products and brands. Needless to say, businesses face stiff competition. For home appliance manufacturer Star Cosmos, its domestic market share of 30–40 percent is under threat from local and overseas players who are keen to target this growing group of consumers.

To stay ahead of the competition and increase productivity and efficiency, Star Cosmos is moving toward smart manufacturing using SAP. As part of this transformation, Star Cosmos had to overhaul its on-premises infrastructure behind the SAP systems supporting two manufacturing plants, 15 distribution points, and more than 30 customer service points. Hendryanto Astantio, senior IT manager at Star Cosmos, explains, “Our servers and storage were aging and becoming less reliable. There was regular downtime, often caused by power cuts to the data center and even flooding. This affected not only our manufacturing business but also other lines of businesses.”

Star Cosmos looked to migrate its SAP R/3 environment to the cloud and evaluated several cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). Although the company received credits from another provider, it chose to run SAP on AWS because of the cloud provider’s strong reputation and ease of use. However, before migrating to AWS, Star Cosmos conducted an internal cost analysis of running SAP on the AWS Cloud versus an on-premises model. “We found that SAP on AWS would save us 10 percent as compared to purchasing a new server, not including the cost of maintenance,” Hendryanto says. The AWS platform’s ease of use enabled Hendryanto and his team to carry out the SAP migration themselves, completing the task in one week.

With SAP on AWS, Star Cosmos can pivot manufacturing based on demand to support sales campaigns and protect market share. Furthermore, with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances powering SAP applications, Star Cosmos has eliminated downtime. “Personnel have continuous visibility across the factory floor, making it easier to manage changes in production lines,” says Hendryanto.

Not only has production control improved, but with Amazon Aurora the company can also improve sales tracking. When products from the company’s Cosmos brand of electric appliances are sold, an item is scanned, and its serial number is stored in SAP. The speed and scalability of Amazon Aurora means Star Cosmos can handle writes to the database during peak sales periods, when the number of daily scans can increase from hundreds to millions.

Furthermore, Star Cosmos has improved overall manufacturing productivity. More than 120 machines mold the plastic for Cosmos products. Previously, the performance and output of each machine was recorded by hand and inputted in SAP, causing human errors that occurred several times a week. Now, through AWS IoT Core, sensors on the machines transmit the data directly into the system. As a result, Star Cosmos has reduced the number of errors and time spent checking these outputs manually. Hendryanto says, “By running SAP on AWS, we’ve been able to increase production by around 5 percent. We have plans to expand our use of AWS IoT, incorporating the solution in our warehouse management system for increased efficiencies.”

To learn more, visit SAP on AWS.