Advantis Management Solutions helps Smurfit-Stone achieve increased availability of mission critical business applications by deploying PATROL 7 and PATROL Enterprise Manager across their enterprise.Organization
Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation (NASDAQ: SSCC) is the industry's leading integrated manufacturer of paperboard and paper-based packaging. Smurfit-Stone is also the world's largest paper recycler, annually processing and selling more than 6.5 million tons. With approximately 38,600 employees working at nearly 260 manufacturing facilities, Smurfit-Stone can provide paperboard and packaging solutions for any customer, large or small, anywhere in North America.
Business Challenge
The Information Technology Department (ITD) at Smurfit-Stone produced a report to its customers in 2003 entitled "less=more". It defined an initiative for ITD to provide more value with fewer resources, hence "less=more". Another key element of Smurfit-Stone's strategy was to develop ITD into a key business partner, as opposed to a separate organization.
Smurfit-Stone's IT landscape is made up of several different distributed and legacy operating platforms in geographically diverse locations. Each of these locations is highly automated and extremely business critical. Performance and availability of applications which are used by the mills must be managed 24/7 so production can stay on target.
Solution
Advantis consultants architected, managed, and delivered a multi-phase BSM project to maximize the efficiency of the technology that drives Smurfit-Stone's business. The solution focuses on implementing tools and processes to drive Infrastructure and Application Management, and Enterprise Event Management. Advantis also put processes into place to ensure that the solution was easily managed.
BMC Software's PATROL 7 solution set is used for monitoring across all platforms in the enterprise. Over 1000 servers on the Windows, AS/400, and UNIX platforms, in all 260 locations were instrumented with PATROL. Advantis consultants created tools to monitor and audit the configuration of Smurfit-Stone's PATROL environment, dramatically reducing the time it takes to deploy and manage the large environment.
PATROL Enterprise Manager was deployed as a single interface for Smurfit-Stone's 24/7 operations center. Advantis consultants integrated PATROL EM into IBM's Netview for network management, BMC's Control-M for job scheduling events, and PATROL for system and application related events. Events are filtered and correlated in order to display a prioritized "to-do" list for Smurfit-Stone's operations staff. A custom web display emphasizes business critical application and network issues to all users.
Today, Smurfit-Stone administrations actively use the solution to monitor performance and troubleshoot potential issues on a range of operating systems and applications. Users interact with the environment through custom views in the PATROL Central Web console to drill down and research the problem for a quick resolution. Advantis consultants also trained Smurfit-Stone's staff to customize and extend PATROL monitoring solutions through the creation of custom Knowledge Modules.
Results
The result was the successful deployment of a large scale Infrastructure, Application, and Event Management solution that truly delivered value. The availability of manufacturing facilities and other critical business components are assured. In August of 2004 BMC Software awarded Smurfit-Stone an excellence award to signify their exceptional achievements, commitment, and cutting edge use of technology to achieve overall IT excellence.
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"Advantis has exhibited the ability to turn our ideas into reality rather quickly and address an area of the Patrol implementation that we viewed as critical to our success."
"I still think that Advantis is easily the best consulting Partner that I work with.""Advantis deliverables were timely, always of high quality..."
"[Advantis] provided excellent consulting expertise when we had architectural 'brainstorming' sessions deciding on the best direction to take the BMC implementation."
"Advantis consultation is the best of breed. My experience is that Advantis can rapidly devise and implement solutions, or they can facilitate detailed and structured business needs analyses to formulate strategic long-term solution sets. This means we can rely on Advantis to provide a robust tactical mechanism to satisfy an immediate need, or we get the seasoned knowledge to guide us toward a demonstrated and lasting systems management solution. These guys rock!"
