Johnsonville
Johnsonville Sausage Lights Up Managed Services From Logicalis to Keep Pans Sizzling With its Products Around the World
Wisconsin-based Johnsonville Sausage is the United States number 1 brand of bratwurst, Italian sausages, smoked-cooked links, and fresh breakfast sausage links. Its products are available in 27 countries including France, Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, and the United States. To keep pans sizzling around the world, Johnsonville relies on a sophisticated IT infrastructure. “There’s a lot of technology in our environment,” says Johnsonville Coach of Operations and Networks, Dan Allensworth.
When Johnsonville extended its SAP implementation from the back offi ce to its entire operation, the company looked for a way to provide effi cient IT management without taxing its current resources.
With SAP basically running the entire organization—from the front offi ce to the hand-held labeling devices on the shop fl oor, Allensworth’s job threatened to become 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Tasks included making sure that the infrastructure was up, the SAN was working, the backups were being done, and that all systems were running, leaving his team with no time for anything else. Team members were on-call throughout the night, getting several calls and then having to go to work the next day.
Around the Clock
“In the last couple of years we went from a centralized, everything-isdone- here-during-the-day shop to an around-the-clock organization. We we were struggling to support it,” Allensworth recalls. “It didn’t make a lot of sense to increase the number of staff, and it’s not easy to fi nd people with all of the skills you need,” Allensworth says. “When a special instance comes up, it requires a technical specialist who knows how to deal with it. If you run into a clustering error or a SAN error, or the SVC node suddenly starts fl apping, you want an expert team that knows what it’s doing.”
Allensworth has been using other services provided by Logicalis for many years. Logicalis provides all of Johnsonville’s IBM servers— including sizing and installing the servers for the SAP implementation. After doing some research and visiting the Logicalis Enterprise Business Operations Center (EBOC), Allensworth decided to give Logicalis’ Managed Services a trial run.
“It was excellent,” Allensworth says. “They knew about issues before we did, and they could see things that we wouldn’t have noticed. They would know exactly when an issue started and could start mitigating it immediately. We might not have seen it until the next day.”
In the Loop
“One of the big advantages of Logicalis’ Managed Services is their communications,” Allensworth says. “They always keep us in the loop. The communications to us through their email and monthly meetings have worked very well.” Allensworth’s team has also benefi ted from Logicalis’ adherence to Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology. “They do an excellent job of following that, and it added some discipline to our crew. On the server side you can have a cowboy mentality,” he admits. “Logicalis pulled the cowboy mentality out of us a little bit.”
Logicalis now provides across-the-board support, including the tape library, the SAN, the network, all critical servers, and email. When Johnsonville upgraded to a new Lotus Notes environment, Logicalis even did the training for them. “Logicalis exceeded our expectations. They really extended beyond what you would think of when you think ‘managed services’,” Allensworth says.
Besides ensuring the well-being of the IT infrastructure, Allensworth says Logicalis Managed Services has resulted in a “quality of life” boost for his team. “We can focus on our core activities and adding new business functionality, or working with plants on changes or additions needed. There is more value added. We still do a lot of maintenance and support, but without Managed Services from Logicalis, it would be ALL maintenance and support.”
“Incidents happen. The SVC node fl apping,” Allensworth recalls, “that was a classic.” “Logicalis spoke directly with IBM and then gave us the fi x. We would never have noticed until an actual outage occurred. Our main node would have to go down before we would have noticed that something is wrong.” Allensworth shudders at the thought. “It’s good to have Logicalis for things like that.”
