“We really appreciated AP’s willingness to listen to our needs and suggest a solution designed to meet our priorities. This approach was in contrast to other larger vendors who were more interested in telling us about their products capabilities.”

Keeping ahead of the performance curve

In early 2007 having rolled out the BRIDGE applications to AUTOGLASS in the UK, BELRON decided to look for a performance and availability solution that would significantly improve the visibility of how the Oracle E-Business and Remedy applications were performing. Nick Burton, Global BRIDGE IT Operations Manager said “We needed a solution that provided us with a detailed view of resource usage within our application servers and a reliable view of our actual end-users experience.”

“Our aim was to continually track performance against acceptable baselines, improve our chances of solving problems before they impacted end users as well as moving from user gut feel about performance to measurements that everyone could believe in.

When we met AP they quickly understood our requirements and suggested a solution that combined Symantec i3 and Indicative Service Director. After a two week proof-of-concept we had seen enough benefit to move to a full implementation prior to adding our French users that would double our workload overnight.”

 

Nick Burton went on to say. “Having Symantec i3 and Indicative in place prior to the French rollout was really important. It meant that we could compare predicted performance with actual performance and quickly isolate performance bottlenecks that otherwise could have threatened our success. On one occasion just after go-live in France we were able to spot strange user behaviour where unfamiliarity with the new applications caused them to create unexpected performance problems. We were alerted to the problem with a particular Oracle E-Business Suiteform which showed up as unusual locking when used by a particular user. Having spotted the problem we were able use remote desktop control software to see exactly what the user was doing and then call them to provide advice. This ability has transformed our whole approach to helping our users and is helping us to dramatically improve the quality of service we are providing to the business.”

Exceeding expectations!

Since the introduction of Symantec i3 and Indicative in March 2007, the products have quickly become key to the way Belron runs IT operations. Large screen monitors keep internal, CSC and Oracle staff informed of system health 24 hours a day. Everyone can now share a common view of a problem which has removed the previous tendency for different teams to point-the-finger. Now everyone is much more focused on drilling into the bottleneck to discover the root-cause.
“The combination of Symantec i3 and Indicative is on track to achieve a positive ROI” said Nick Burton. “This is based on the savings we are making in IT staff time and end-user productivity. Include in this these savings are time associated with managing the SLA relationship between BELRON and CSC.”

Symantec i3 benefits

• Ability to diagnose performance issues in near real time

• Visibility – providing a single version of the truth that BELRON, CSC and Oracle teams can all benefit from

• Ease of use - showing graphically exactly where the bottleneck is

• Oracle Support - isolating a number of areas where Oracle E-Business Suite needed improvements and providing the proof BELRON needed to enable Oracle Support to create patches

Indicative benefits

• Very fast implementation – deployment and configuration within days

• Single screen health report - showing all key aspects of Oracle E-Business Suite and Remedy health in one place

• Performance and availability SLA measurements - for key business measures and end-user transactions

• Flexible licensing - ability to change what is being monitored over time as the priorities of the business alter

AP benefits

• Quick to understand our needs

• Highly skilled – completing a proof-of-concept in just a few days

• Very nimble and responsive to on-going challenges

• Continually suggesting new ideas to leverage the products going forward

Future plans

“As we incorporate more countries into the centralised BRIDGE infrastructure we intend to expand our use of both Symantec i3 and Indicative Service Director”, said Nick Burton. “In parallel we intend to utilise more of the functionality that already exists in the products. Due to short term pressures we have been unable to explore all of the capabilities and we will look to AP to ensure that we maximise all of the benefits on offer.”