Global Manufacturing Company Accelerates Digital Transformation

Customer Profile

This worldwide manufacturing company operates across thousands of global locations, developing and manufacturing industrial and high-tech solutions. With organic growth and a history of acquisitions, the company has expanded into new products, industries and geographies. They manage a complex eco-system of R&D facilities, manufacturing plants and channel distribution offices, in addition to regional and global headquarters facilities. 

The NETSCOUT solution is used by the global IT organization that provides IT services, as an internal service provider, to all divisions of the company. 

The Challenge

The company was in the process of implementing several initiatives for digital transformation to optimize business and manufacturing processes as well as internal and external communication. These changes drove the need for Data Center modernization, including upgrading to 40G, migrating to hybrid cloud deployments, and co-locating a portion of their network and applications to a 3rd party site. To support these changes, the IT team needed to deploy new architecture using a new provisioning methodology. 

Of course, business didn’t stop while IT was making these upgrades. Like changing the tires on a moving bus, they were still confronted with on-going issues affecting users. A few major issues were consuming resources and had the potential to impact business. Of primary concern at the executive level was on-going contact center voice issues with their VoIP service. Although problems were reported regularly, they were not consistent from site to site and not easily resolved. Another on-going situation was that a majority of tickets submitted to the IT Service- Desk were opened as a “network” problem, but only a small number were actually network problems. IT needed to find the cause of issues and get the tickets in the hands of the people that could address them earlier to save time and resources. 

Solution in Action

IT Operations selected NETSCOUT to be an integral part of their data center modernization going forward. With software-based solutions and appliances for their new 40G architecture, they gained the visibility to confidently move ahead with their digital transformation plans in a far more cost-effective manner than had they tried to refresh the existing legacy environment. The nGeniusONE platform with next-generation InfiniStreamNG software appliances, together with the Packet Flow Operating System, provides the real-time, packet-level visibility they need across the Data Center, co-location facilities, and hybrid cloud, to monitor and gather data from the multiple IP network domains. 

To address the poor VoIP call quality, the voice team identified key locations with potential issues and began using NETSCOUT for service monitoring at these sites. They now have performance benchmarks for each site using metrics including packet loss, latency, jitter, and MOS scores. 

When a user does report a call-quality problem, the help team asks basic questions; time and location, to identify the call flow. They review the transaction in nGeniusONE to determine if the issue is due to the network or some part of the UC service.

The Results

With new 40G architecture and a new cost model, the company’s digital transformation initiatives are accelerating and helping the company meet growth goals. With seamless visibility across the full network from NETSCOUT, IT has the agility and data to make informed and timely decisions to cost-effectively optimize the network. 

The IT organization is fulfilling goals to increase collaboration by providing password access to nGeniusONE for the voice team. In turn, the voice team now has visibility to proactively identify potential call-quality issues and uses the information from nGeniusONE to make corrections and changes as necessary at key sites, often before users are impacted. Mean-Time- To-Know is reduced for all tickets with NETSCOUT alerts going directly to the Help Desk Application (Service Now) for triage to isolate network issues and immediately assign to the correct team for resolution. 

Finally, the organization is optimizing their monitoring budgets using NETSCOUT’s software and virtual monitoring appliances for service assurance visibility. The ability to monitor voice as well as business data services simultaneously, share access throughout the IT team, and use evidence-based data with their third-party co-lo vendor is improving overall productivity that in the end benefits customers and employees alike. This manufacturer is now able to ensure their digital transformations are meeting the needs of their business and customers.