Overview

Founded in 1899, Sonoco is a $4.8 billion global provider of consumer packaging, industrial products, protective solutions, and display and packaging services. Headquartered in Hartsville, South Carolina, Sonoco serves customers in 85 nations and produces packaging for many of the world’s most recognized brands.

Sonoco’s strategic vision is to be the global leader in providing inventive packaging solutions that optimize their customers’ businesses and brands. Like many industry-leading organizations, Sonoco relies on AMD innovation.

Challenge

Sonoco is committed to both corporate sustainability and shareholder value. Accordingly, the organization faced three distinct challenges on the technology front: standardization, sustainability and affordability.

Sonoco needed to establish global technology standards that would support its nearly 20,000 employees and estimated 10,000 network nodes, which include everything from servers to tablets and engineering workstations, desktops, digital printers, smart phones and thin client hardware.

Additionally, Sonoco was interested in energy-efficient technologies that would complement its commitment to recycling approximately three million tons of paper, metal and plastic per year, and its recognition as a sustainable and responsible corporate citizen by Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, Corporate Responsibility Magazine, and Newsweek Magazine’s “Green Rankings”.

Finally, the 117-year-old company views information technology as a business driver, not just business cost-center. Accordingly, Sonoco’s IT professionals—which it refers to as “Business Technologists”— are expected to operate on a tight budget and innovate in order to find ways to do more with less.

Solution

In the Spring of 2015 Sonoco began six months of strategic field testing of the HP EliteBook 745 G2 notebooks. Those systems included an AMD Quad-Core APU, Radeon™ Graphics, HP Client Management Solutions and DASH support.

HP ELITEBOOK 745 WITH AMD PRO TECHNOLOGY

Success story Sonoco + AMD

Innovative technology for an inventive packaging solutions provider

HP EliteBook 745 and HP EliteDesk 705 G3 with AMD PRO technology

“With tight budgets we had to find a way to increase the value to Sonoco. AMD’s value proposition piqued my interest and allowed Sonoco BT to standardize and drive out cost.

- KAROL “KJ” JAMROK SENIOR GLOBAL TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT, SONOCO

Sonoco has more than

in 33 different countries300 operation sites

Pleased with initial feedback from employees from a wide variety of duties and settings ranging from plant shop floor to graphic design and engineers, Sonoco next deployed the HP EliteDesk 705 G3 Mini and Small Form Factor (SFF) PCs. “AMD was there to help educate us, if necessary, which made it a seamless transition. Everything was smooth and flawless,” Sonoco’s KJ said.

Employees with graphics-related duties embraced the benefits of AMD’s industry-leading Radeon technologies, while engineering and technical staff found they were able to quickly access their applications and algorithms.

In Spring of 2016, Sonoco transitioned divisions and departments to all AMD-based products, including laptops, desktops and thin clients. “The more standardized and the leaner and meaner we can get,” KJ said, “the easier it is to manage Business Technology across the globe.”

Benefits

Subsequent to a widening implementation of AMD technologies, Sonoco has saved significant capital and operating expense, increased product life cycles and reduced energy consumption and costs.

The organization known for its dedication to sustainability also increased the sustainability of its business technology investments. “Due to the reliability and quality of the products AMD puts under the HP hood, I’ve had no need to go to AMD for support,” KJ added. “Since switching over to AMD, we’ve almost doubled product life cycles, and the fact that many AMD products and chipsets consume less power is an added bonus.”

For more information, please visit http://www.amd.com/pro

Sonoco currently refreshes or deploys between 1,500 and 2,000 PCs per year and saves approximately $50 per AMD-based desktops.

By 2020, Sonoco’s Business Technology team expects to refresh or deploy approximately 9,000 AMD-based units.

© 2017 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.

In 2016 we budgeted $50,000 in productivity savings by switching to AMD. Through June of 2016 we saved $50,000 in capital and operating expense, and by the end of 2016 we saved over $100,000. I’m confident that the savings will only increase as we continue to leverage more AMD solutions down the road.

- KAROL “KJ” JAMROK SENIOR GLOBAL TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT, SUNOCO

Sonoco refreshed or deployed AMD-based workstations per year.

20202019201820172016

1,500 to 2,000 refreshed PCs

Up to 9,000 refreshed PCs