SFS Group Reduces IT Costs with a Centrally Managed Infrastructure and EYE for Network Management
With a global manufacturing and distribution network of more than 65 sites in 21 countries throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, centrally managing and serving the SFS Group’s critical business services for the more than 4100 employees may seem an insurmountable task, but that’s just an average day for the technology and operations team at SFS services AG. Based in two centralized data centers located in Heerbrugg, Switzerland, all of the company’s main business, communication, storage, accounting, customer management, and ordering systems are hosted for maximum efficiency and ease of maintenance. Connecting users at all of these sites – and the SFS Group to its customers – is a complex and distributed network infrastructure providing the foundation for business productivity.
Four business units comprise the SFS Group: SFS intec is a global development partner, manufacturer, and supplier of precision cold formed components, specialty fasteners, and mechanical fastening systems. SFS unimarket is a leading national supplier of fasteners, tools, architectural hardware, and chemical/technical products. SFS locher is an efficient, full-service supplier of steel, metal, building supplies, construction tools, and concrete reinforcement systems. SFS services is the group’s in-house service provider for finance, controlling, information technology, HR management, marketing services, and central support services. Although their product lines and markets they serve are diverse, they all share the main electronic business systems.
Using Entuity’s Eye of the Storm® (EYE), SFS services has implemented a network management solution that solves their operational challenges. With EYE, IT personnel have a top-down view of their entire network with separate views for each business location. The views include logical collections of all the network components that serve a particular business unit – comprising both local devices and central devices – to provide performance and operational forensics from the user’s perspective. This gives IT staff the information and insight required to make informed decisions about capacity and availability for optimum service delivery.
“EYE gives us a top-down, business-centric view of our network that we previously did not have,” says Patrick Bichler, manager Technology & Operations for SFS services AG. “This gives us clear visibility from a user’s perspective to the complete infrastructure serving each location – including devices both at the local facility and our central operations center – to better manage and reliably deliver services to our user community.”
