HKScan is a Northern European food products manufacturing company of ready-made meals and pet foods. Its history traces back to 1913, but the organization realized significant growth in the 1990s, and expanded into international markets starting in the early 2000s. Today, it is one of the most prominent food manufacturing industries in Europe, and serves nearly 50 countries throughout the globe.
The global food culture has changed a lot. With the worldwide increase in snacking, people have steadily moved to different food options over traditional meals for various reasons. These changing consumer trends have a direct impact on the food industry. HKScan's primary business objective is to align their production goals with food consumption trends.
Production goals are often met with the help of the company's numerous processing facilities based in different countries. These operations form the backbone of HKScan's revenue.
Every food processing facility utilizes specialized hardware and software systems to meet the unique needs and regulatory requirements of the food industry. These include but not limited to:
Similarly, HKScan has several processing facilities located in multiple locations in Europe. Each facility includes a main data center. In total, HKScan operates about 10 data centers managing 100 servers, in a distributed network.
These servers have crucial business services running on them. To ensure the daily production goals are met, the HKScan operations teams require real-time data on the:
Before using ManageEngine OpManager, HKScan's IT staff found it very difficult to pinpoint the source of any issue in their IT network because of the complexity of their network. The IT team could not easily identify devices that were causing performance issues because the IT environment consists of both client and network devices.
Some of the major network issues involved bandwidth bottlenecks and performance issues with network devices such as switches, and routers. This complicated the management of IT operations, which in turn increased the mean time to repair (MTTR). These complications also led them to rely on external suppliers to troubleshoot network issues. Because their manufacturing unit operates 24/7, it requires high availability.
OpManager provides full control of the IT environment to the Ops team. Earlier, the IT ops team had to rely on an external provider for troubleshooting.
With the help of OpManager, HKScan's IT personnel are able to enhance their network performance by gaining in-depth visibility into the company's IT infrastructure. This minimizes the time taken for troubleshooting. OpManager also notifies the network admins in case of any network discrepancies such as downtime, and unprecedented outages.
HKScan's IT admins use OpManager extensively to monitor the router and switch performance, services, etc. They use event logs and syslogs to track various system activities, to ensure fault management is carried out efficiently.
OpManager helps the company monitor its business critical metrics.
"We had to use an external market-leading supplier for troubleshooting on our networks, earlier. With OpManager, we can do most of the work ourselves and stay up to date. We can now proactively monitor and address issues on the network," said Krystian Mlodochowski, an I&O specialist at HKScan.
Dashboards: Utilizing OpManager, the IT staff checks for the availability of devices on the network, through customizable dashboards.
"With the help of OpManager, our downtime is significantly shorter," Mlodochowski noted.
Unified UI: HKScan's IT team find OpManager's unified UI very beneficial. This feature enables the IT admins to improve their network performance seamlessly and enhance productivity.
"OpManager's simple UI makes work much easier. With this, our downtime is significantly shorter," Mlodochowski said.
Rack View: U By using OpManager, the company's IT staff can create three-dimensional virtual rack views. The racks virtually display the number of devices present and help the IT admins have better understanding of their IT environment.
Threshold-based alerting: U OpManager benefits the company's IT staff by overseeing business critical metrics, such as packet loss and bandwidth utilization, through threshold based alerts.
"There are configurations that I can set and OpManager will warn if the threshold values are exceeded. This way we can address the issues on our networks effectively," Krysten observed.
Business View Map: OpManager's ability to provide business view maps with all necessary insights is a significant benefit. The HKScan IT team use this feature to monitor and ensure the availability of business critical applications at all times.
Functional effectiveness: HKScan's IT team is easily able to monitor devices across their complex IT infrastructure. OpManager's functionality and scalability features enable the IT team to accomplish this effectively.
Agent-less functioning: OpManager's ability to function without agents was a primary reason cited by HKScan's IT team for purchasing OpManager.
OpManager ensures HKScan's return on investments (ROI); it has proven to be a valuable asset to the company. According to Mlodochowski, the company estimates it saves around 170,000 USD every year by utilizing OpManager.
HKSscan save up to:
ManageEngine OpManager is a network management platform that helps organizations of all sizes and service providers manage their data centers and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost-effectively. Automated workflows, intelligent alerting engines, discovery rules, and extendable templates enable IT teams to set up a 24/7 monitoring system quickly and easily. Do-it-yourself add-ons extend the scope of management to include network change and configuration management, IP address management, and monitor networks, applications, databases, and virtualization. For more information about OpManager, visit manageengine.com/opmanager.
