Case Study

Large Multi-National Beverage Manufacturer Keeps Orders Flowing with NETSCOUT Solution

Large Multi-National Beverage Manufacturer Keeps Orders Flowing with NETSCOUT Solution

Highlights

Business Challenge
  • Inability to quickly troubleshoot and resolve ERP issues impacting revenue, customer service, and users throughout the company
  • IT had no network, server, or application visibility to proactively detect service issues
  • IT spent weeks at a time reactively and unsuccessfully investigating log files, leaving no time to focus on more proactive business needs
NETSCOUT Solution
  • nGeniusONE® and InfiniStreamNG™ appliances quickly identified, isolated, and mitigated a myriad of issues contributing to ERP and UC&C problems
  • nGeniusONE provides proactive alerts for service issues before users call the helpdesk
  • The solution provides reports to keep track of service performance and availability as well as provide capacity planning
Business Value
  • Eliminated risk of damaging their business reputation by addressing ERP delays that were severely impacting customer service
  • Improved revenue opportunities and employee productivity by proactively addressing ERP and UC&C performance issues
  • The IT team is more efficient and collaborative allowing them to focus on higher level business needs

Customer Profile

This multi-national manufacturing company operates across hundreds of locations throughout Europe and Asia, brewing and delivering over a hundred brands of beer in 150 countries. In an effort to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and improve customer service, they have centralized global procurement, logistics, and end-to-end planning through the supply chain. This requires a large, distributed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and it must perform well in order to reach their revenue and productivity goals while simultaneously providing superior customer service.

Business Challenge

This multi-national manufacturing company relied heavily on their ERP system from SAP to operate their business but performance problems were impacting customer service, limiting revenue opportunity, and risking the company’s reputation. In many cases, it would take customer service representatives 8 – 9 minutes to enter a customer order into the system that should normally take about 1 minute. The delay was caused by slow performance with the ERP screens and the system temporarily freezing. It was not uncommon for the system to freeze multiple times during a single transaction and the customer service representatives found themselves making small talk each time. Not only did this risk damage to the company’s reputation, but it also impacted the total number of orders that could be taken on any given day which affected overall revenue. This was a critical problem that needed to be addressed.

The IT team was running blind with no network, server, or application monitoring or management. They had been trying to solve the problem by manually parsing log files, which was not only time consuming but not working. They knew they needed better visibility and a tool that could point them to the root cause.

NETSCOUT Solution

With the ordering process being impacted, as well as other ERP performance issues impacting productivity throughout the company, they turned to NETSCOUT® to identify the root cause, triage, and resolve the issues. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, along with InfiniStreamNG appliances, provides visibility into the ERP system, including the application, servers, network, and service dependencies. In addition to visibility, the intelligence in the system allows the IT team to quickly find, troubleshoot, and fix problems when they arise. The NETSCOUT solution finds the root causes of issues in minutes that were undiscovered by IT teams who had spent weeks pouring through log files trying to find them.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

The nGeniusONE solution was quick to solve the known problems as well as continuously monitor to detect and solve any new issues that arose over time.

The order entry issue was diagnosed swiftly after monitoring the service and viewing analysis in the dashboard. With over a million transactions per hour, finding the root cause of the slowdowns and frozen screen issues was a monumental task. Combined with the fact that multiple issues contributed to creating these significant delays across so many transactions, the complexity was a major challenge for the IT Team.

nGeniusONE showed poor performance for the ERP service overall upon initial analysis. Seamless drill downs to the service monitor revealed several contributing issues: insufficient buffer space in the ERP servers, buffer overflow conditions, unsupported transfer syntax errors, incompatible TCP window sizes and Server Message Block (SMB) protocol security issues. They were all found to be contributing factors to the slowdowns and window freezes. Once these issues were individually addressed, performance returned to the expected levels allowing normal customer service exchanges to take the roughly one minute they required.

Only the nGeniusONE solution provides the broad service assurance capabilities necessary to discover issues across the multitude of infrastructure devices and several applications and protocols that were creating the massive delays this beverage manufacturer’s customers and service reps were experiencing. Point tools were wholly ineffective! In addition to ongoing service assurance for the ERP system, the voice team is using the nGeniusONE solution for improving the UC&C service at the call centers distributed throughout the company. This significantly improves productivity and customer satisfaction.

Business Value

The nGeniusONE platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances gave this beverage company a comprehensive, holistic, enterprise wide service assurance solution to successfully bring members of the network and applications operations teams together to uncover and resolve the several issues impacting customers, revenue, reputation and productivity. Further collaboration was fostered with the voice team in improving UC&C services in their call centers as well.

Most importantly, the NETSCOUT solution has improved revenue opportunity, employee productivity, and customer service by improving performance of the ERP system. IT can now proactively solve problems before they impact users vs. the old method where they would spend weeks trying to solve problems reported by users. In addition to better customer service and better ERP performance throughout the business, the NETSCOUT solution helps the IT team quickly detect, troubleshoot, and triage problems, allowing them to spend less time chasing issues and focus on more proactive business needs.