Strauss group improves incident & problem resolution in the ERP system using eyeShare™
Who is Strauss Group?
Strauss Group, Israel’s second-largest food and Beverage Company, has become, over the past few years, an international corporation with a steadily growing part of its business conducted outside of Israel. The Group employs 11,600 people and operates nineteen production sites in sixteen countries.
Mr. Yaron Romano is Technology & Infrastructure Director at Strauss Group since 2004. Mr. Romano formed the Infrastructure, Technology and Networking strategy for Strauss Group. Prior to Strauss he was the CTO of Elite a Food production company.
Challenges at Strauss with ERP for sales ordering handling
Strauss was experiencing serious issues with the reliability of its sales order processing chain of events. This starts with sales agents taking orders in the field using PDA’s and then flows through a multi-step IT process using SQL Server, Terminal system management and SAP. Strauss were finding that performance bottlenecks, databases, message queues and other resources were delaying or preventing orders from reaching manufacturing and delivery in a timely manner, which was costing Strauss loss of revenue and customer service issues. Strauss IT needed a solution that would (a) cut down on the number of such incidents and (b) when an incident did occur, it would minimize the mean time to repair to get the sales ordering systems back to normal.
Alternative solutions – Classical monitoring versus eyeShare?
Strauss IT was faced with the choice as to how to resolve this and other similar issues. The obvious approach would have been to select and implement classical monitoring systems, but Mr. Romano and his team decided that those monitoring system would not have been a complete solution for several reasons. By contrast, they realized that eyeShare™ would represent a complete solution as it filled the gaps in areas such as providing process workflow for the pre-emptive or reactive recovery of sales ordering & processing systems, and also it would be able to involve people in the recovery decision-making process.
eyeShare™ reduced incidents mean time to repair by more than 80%
During a short Proof Of Concept (POC) Strauss were able to implement specific workflow processes for their critical systems. These ensure that whenever a field agent uses his PDA to enter a purchase order which goes through the purchasing chain over Strauss’s network, eyeShare™ validates that each element in the chain works properly without any latency or failure. The database and applications are analyzed in order to identify such things as process locks, file issues and abnormal process queues. When eyeShare™ identifies a possible failure in one of the elements, it immediately initiates the appropriate procedure which notifies and escalates the problem to the right people as well as starting an automated recovery process defined to minimize human involvement and to reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). Furthermore, the relevant team leader can initiate a set of proactive checks by using his mobile and sending an SMS to eyeShare™.
eyeShare™ delivers great benefits to Strauss and its IT team
Yoram Romano says “After we finished the POC of eyeShare we immediately saw the great benefits that the solution brought. These included a rapid ability to proactively detect possible issues in our sales order processing chain and the further ability to automate putting those issues back to normal with very little manual intervention”. Since this system is the “life blood” of Strauss’s business, it was very valuable to Strauss and its IT team to provide such a solution. Mr. Romano adds “eyeShare was very quick to implement and easy to operate and maintain. It integrates with our production systems with no real changes. It is a smart and efficient solution for us.”
The solution has also cut costs for Strauss IT by automating these recovery processes which previously required a lot of manual intervention. Mr. Romano concludes “we have been able to re-deploy key IT staff to other less mundane jobs now that eyeShare is in place. IT staff now only have to step in to make key decisions rather than doing all the legwork they had to do before. This gives my team a higher quality job and also saves money for Strauss.”
And what about the future?
Now that Strauss IT has implemented the sales order process under control of eyeShare™, they are encouraged to go on and apply the solution to many other mission-critical systems in areas such as supply chain, delivery and logistics and billing and financial systems
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