"A new infrastructure platform enabled greater visibility, efficiency and expansion of our client’s warehousing function. Using IBM Power and FlashSystem, this technology layer provides a future-proofed platform to serve and expand their most critical business requirements for warehouse functions—while also delivering premier services to their customers."
Our client is one of Ireland’s leading food retail and wholesale company, with more than 40,000 employees spread across over 1,400 retail outlets in Ireland and Europe. Despite the size of its operations, the company’s warehousing logistics have been run on the same supply chain management system for more than 20 years.
But with total retail sales now surpassing €4.5 billion annually, the complexity and volume of its warehousing operations finally outgrew its legacy logistics solution. The company needed a new, future-proof warehouse management solution (WMS) that could increase its warehouse productivity and efficiency, enable real-time processing, enable process automation, and increase inventory accuracy across all of its warehouses.
To enable this solution, they needed an infrastructure with the stability, scalability, visibility and flexibility required to help deliver all technical and business benefits that the new application was selected to deliver.
Triangle worked with the client's internal team to identify the capabilities, design features and other criteria required for the company’s new infrastructure to enable their warehouse management solution. Vendor support, license costs, flexibility, end user adjacency, service availability, and the implementation partner were all key considerations when planning the best-fit platform.
To meet the solution’s application middleware and data management requirements, the decision was made to select the IBM SystemP platform with WebSphere and DB2. Triangle delivered an architect-led managed service, as well as associated SLAs, platform evolution, DR readiness, capacity management and performing-tuning activities across all environments onto which the warehouse management solution was deployed.
The IBM solution provided the client with the stability, scalability, visibility and flexibility required to help deliver all technical and business benefits that the new application was selected for. The solution is future proofed and incorporates plans for Platform Evolution, Disaster Recovery
readiness, proactive capacity management and ongoing performance tuning activities. Triangle's ability to provide deep expertise across the entire IBM platform incorporates a fully Managed Service and that ensures a robust service to both the client and their customers.
“There are many benefits with this project. The data centre, stability-wise, is ten times better than it was. Also, performance has improved dramatically, for example, we are able to run our month end processes on our systems locally and they completed in one hour. Prior to this project it took eight hours to complete.”
Once the new logistics solution was implemented, the business impact was immediate. Our client immediately experienced enhanced visibility into its operations, as well as improved efficiency and expansion of the new warehousing function across their entire group.
Triangle’s delivered technology layer ensures that our client has a future-proofed platform to serve and expand their most critical business requirements for warehouse functions. Through the exceptional availability and performance of IBM SystemP and FlashSystem, they now operate with a stable, high-performance architecture enabling its most critical business application.
