North American Construction Group transforms its IT infrastructure

Transcription

1 North American Group transforms its IT infrastructure With the help of IBM Overview Business challenge NACG employees were losing faith in an unreliable JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application, which experienced frequent outages and did not meet business requirements. Single business units purchased alternative applications to meet their enterprise resource planning needs, thereby escalating IT costs and preventing integrated decision making. Solution Worked with IBM Global Technology Services and IBM Global Business Services to implement IBM Power 570 servers running the IBM i operating system, IBM System Storage technology and IBM DB2 software. North American Group (NACG) is the leading provider of mining, heavy construction, industrial, piling and pipeline services in Canada. Headquartered in Calgary, the company has several branch offices in Western Canada, including Edmonton, Vancouver and Regina. For over 50 years, NACG has capitalized on its distinctive combination of talent and experience, allowing it to make the most of the unprecedented economic growth of the Alberta oil sands in the last decade. NACG aims to be an agile, responsive company, but an unreliable JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application suite was hampering these efforts. Users were rapidly losing faith in the JDE application, as it experienced frequent outages and did not meet business requirements. This led to many business units seeking and implementing alternative applications for their own use, a trend that made it difficult to establish a single version of the truth for decision-making. Furthermore, this fragmented IT landscape was expensive and difficult to manage. The relationship between the IT department and the rest of the company suffered due to this unreliability IT was perceived as a costcenter, with a high level of dissatisfaction among internal clients. In turn, the IT staff found it impossible to focus on more profitable work due to the huge volume of maintenance requests they had to deal with. The company estimated that the IT department was forced to handle an average of 60 JDE-related issues each day. The company lacked a dependable environment for development and struggled with inconsistent connectivity. To further exacerbate the issues, failover capability was nonexistent. Recovery from a disaster was almost impossible. Essentially, the company was in need of a complete IT overhaul.

2 Business Benefits Increased employee productivity and satisfaction by improving performance, reliability and enabling introduction of new functionalities. Contributed to a year over year IT cost reduction of 52 percent. Gained the ability to scale with business growth. It was not realistic for us to generate regular reports on the old hardware, as it frequently brought the entire system to a halt, or slowed down other operations so much that employees abandoned the effort, says Booth. This was not the ideal environment for expanding NACG, because it was severely limiting our ability to seize important business opportunities. It was clear that the situation called for a drastic change in our IT infrastructure. Perhaps the most significant example of how the previous solution was causing disruption in NACG is the issues with payroll. The company systems often experienced unplanned downtime, making it difficult to track how much workers were owed and ensure that they were paid in a timely manner. This called for significant manual effort - impacting productivity and aggravating the relationship with the IT department. Identifying and tackling the issues The entrance of David Booth, a new CIO at NACG, marked a turning point when he identified that the company s IT headaches might be traced back to the instability of the underlying platform. NACG was relying on Intel processor-based Dell servers running Microsoft Windows to support the JDE application and a Microsoft SQL Server database. There was no centralized storage infrastructure. As Booth pointed out, Up until that point, IT costs were escalating without producing the positive results we hoped for. It was evident that a new approach was needed, so we began looking at the infrastructure supporting the JDE application. We wanted to repair the poor perception of IT held by the rest of the company, and ensure that it made the life of our workforce easier, rather than representing a daily annoyance. Our mantra became IT will not be an excuse. NACG worked with IBM Global Technology Services to install, implement and configure two IBM Power 570 servers, running the IBM i operating system on POWER6 processors. The company also deployed two IBM System Storage DS4700 disk systems, later upgraded to DS5300 systems connected to two TS3310 tape libraries. The software components selected by NACG consist of a full suite of IBM i and IBM DB2 tools for the server environments including Backup Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) and icluster replication services.

3 Solution Components Hardware IBM Power 570 IBM System Storage DS5300 IBM TS3310 tape libraries Software IBM DB2 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Services IBM Global Business Services IBM Global Technology Services The company also called on IBM Global Business Services to plan, implement and validate the migration of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application from the Microsoft Windows and SQL Server platform to the IBM i and IBM DB2 landscape. Before committing to the solution, NACG conducted extensive critical and parallel testing of the solution, supported by IBM, to ensure that the solution could deliver on its promised levels of performance and reliability. The results were impressive, and the migration was completed by NACG IT with support from IBM Global Business Services within a single weekend, minimizing disruption to the business. The IBM solution represented the ideal choice for us as a major step to achieving our goal of a complete IT turnaround, and solves the numerous issues with the old infrastructure, says Booth. The proven reliability of the IBM Power 570 servers meant that the outages which had been an everyday experience for our employees quickly became a distant memory. Virtualization enables business flexibility Taking advantage of the IBM PowerVM virtualization capabilities of the IBM Power 570 servers enabled NACG to maintain a full test environment without unduly diverting resources from the production environment or affecting normal business operations. It also allowed users to run reports at high speed for the first time, encouraging them to ask more questions and providing vital information for decisionmaking. The modular expansion capabilities of the IBM Power 570 servers will help to support NACG as its business grows. When more memory or processors are required, the company will simply be able to activate additional resources within the existing chassis, either permanently or on an on-demand basis to handle temporary workload peaks. By deploying IBM storage technology, NACG was able to more than double its available storage capacity. The company has leveraged some of the additional capacity to provision a logical partition supporting an IBM AIX environment for a new application.

4 I am proud to say that with help from IBM we have succeeded in improving the attitude towards IT within NACG. Our IT department is now perceived as a responsive part of the organization, and is showcased in bids to clients as a value-add differentiator. David Booth, Chief Information Officer, North American Group The IBM solution has given us so much more flexibility, comments Booth. Not only can we adjust capacity on demand, but using logical partitions allows us to set up new environments that were simply out of reach for us using the old hardware. Changing the perception of IT The main benefit for NACG has been the improvement of the relationship between the majority of its employees and the IT department. By taking measures to guarantee the integrity of the information generated by its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application, the company has restored faith in its IT infrastructure. I am proud to say that with help from IBM we have succeeded in improving the attitude towards IT within NACG, says Booth. Our IT department is now perceived as a responsive part of the organization, and is showcased in bids to clients as a value-add differentiator. Leveraging the industry-leading performance of IBM DB2 on IBM Power 570 servers has greatly improved response times and batch lengths. For example, a complex report that previously took nine hours to generate is now available in 20 minutes. The company is able to use its JDE application to provide timely project information for clients and enabled customized reporting. NACG can now pursue several customer-centric functionalities that were simply not feasible on the old, unreliable platform. Maximizing employee productivity There has been a sharp rise in user satisfaction levels, with the number of daily JDE complaints to the IT department dropping from 60 to a negligible level. Eliminating outages and maximizing uptime allows all NACG employees to be much more productive, and focus on profitable work. On the rare occasions when issues do arise, sophisticated diagnostic tools built into the IBM Power 570 servers make it easy for NACG s IT department to resolve them. Our employees have been freed from the time-consuming JDE issues they had been forced to deal with every day, says Booth. Specifically, our IT department has been able to take a more proactive stance, focusing on developing new functionalities and introducing new applications that improve the computing landscape, rather than focusing on maintenance.

5 IBM has become a key technology partner for NACG... By drawing on the IBM consultants experience, we were able to go beyond simply modernizing the IT department: we are now empowered to introduce new functionalities that will contribute to our further success. David Booth, Chief Information Officer, North American Group Reducing the administrative burden on IT staff and maximizing general employee productivity has translated into significant cost-savings for NACG. As part of a complete IT refreshment program, the IBM technology has contributed to an overall year over year 52 percent IT cost reduction. IBM technology makes it possible to optimize use of company resources. This is especially evident in the payroll system the highly reliable IBM technology has enabled NACG to ensure accurate and timely payment of its workforce. By supplying guidance from system sizing right through to migration and go-live of the new solution, IBM developed a strong relationship with the NACG team. Booth concludes: IBM has become a key technology partner for NACG, providing support during a difficult period of total transformation of our IT infrastructure. By drawing on the IBM consultants experience, we were able to go beyond simply modernizing the IT department; we are now empowered to introduce new functionalities that will contribute to our further success. For more information To learn more about IBM solutions, contact your IBM sales representative or visit: ibm.com To learn more about North American Group, visit:

6 Copyright IBM Corporation 2010 IBM Global Services Route 100 Somers, NY U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America July 2010 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, DB2, Power Systems and System Storage are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol ( or ), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at Copyright and trademark information at: ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml. Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Inside logo, Intel Centrino, Intel Centrino logo, Celeron, Intel Xeon, Intel SpeedStep, Itanium, and Pentium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other product, company or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. Offerings are subject to change, extension or withdrawal without notice. All client examples cited represent how some clients have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS-IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED. Please Recycle ISC03060-CAEN-00