Managed Services Put to Work
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 one 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
office to its entire operation, the company looked for a way to
provide efficient IT management without taxing its current
resources.
With SAP basically running the entire organization—from the front
office to the hand-held labeling devices on the shop
floor—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 all
systems were running, leaving Allensworth’s team with no time for
anything else. Team members were on-call throughout the night,
getting an average of several calls nightly 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
is done here during the day shop to an around-the-clock
organization. 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 find 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 flapping, you want an expert team that knows what
it’s doing.”
Allensworth had 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
benefited 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 flapping,” Allensworth recalls,
“that was a classic. Logicalis spoke directly with IBM and then
gave us the fix. 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.”
Managed Services Customer
“Logicalis exceeded our expectations. They really extend beyond
what you would think of when you think ‘managed services’.”
Dan Allensworth,
Coach of Operations and Networks,
Johnsonville Sausage
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