When you can’t afford things to go wrong – you need op5 Monitor
Clas Ohlson (pub) is a listed retail company with great vision and ambitious goals. At the head office, where the base for all distribution is, is also the central for the company IT. In addition to operation and support of all internal IT, they also manages the development of business support applications such as inventory management and control of the flow of goods.
The central warehouse, for Clas Ohlson also includes two robotic warehouse where the collection and return of pallets is fully automatic. The range consists of 15,000 products. There are 162 stores in the Nordic countries and in the UK. The company also offers e-commerce. All this means that absolutely nothing may go wrong in the automated supply chain. That is why the company Clas Ohlson has chosen op5 Monitor for advanced monitoring of their business-critical systems and material flows.
Advanced logistics system
Order entry is done automatically as the ordering points on individual shelves in stores undercut. Such events trigger automatic retrieval of a pallet of current products in the central warehouse for shipment to the store. Since 2003, the company Clas Ohlson uses op5 Monitor for all monitoring, a system that over time has grown to include approximately 4,700 monitoring points, of which 650 devices. The monitoring center is staffed business hours, in addition, a preparedness group receiving critical alerts via SMS.
Integration with biztalk
As the engine for any transaction flows the company uses Microsoft BizTalk Server, which has been integrated with the monitoring system using plugins. Among other things, they monitor the status of the interface and transactional queues. Receipt Flows from the POS terminals in the stores are monitored, as backup shooting, response time of the switches, and other network components. Shop POS terminals are business critical for Clas Ohlson, they must be able to function even during total interruption. They are therefore equipped with a local SQL-based article databases, and all receipts are stored locally at checkout until they can be sent up to a central server for forwarding into business systems.
Since these receipts are a central part of the automated logistics flow, all the points where receipts can fall are monitored, so that nothing will stop the flow and the queues are not too long. op5 Monitor is also used for passive monitoring of cash terminals, for fear that the disk space is full.
Redundant systems
As more and more flows of operations have been automated, Clas Ohlson has become increasingly dependent on the reliability of their monitoring. Recently, they invested in a load balanced solution from op5, to minimize vulnerability and disruptions.
Proactive IT management
Using the report module in op5 Monitor Clas Ohlson has an ongoing access to SNMP-based performance graphs. This allows them to keep track of disk space and a number of other trends, which means that they can take action before the capacity-related bottlenecks develops into real problems.
“op5 Monitor is a very convenient product to work with, yet it is extremely flexible when it comes to own adaptations, both in the
form of plug-ins and other functionality” says Jan Larsson, IT Security Manager at Clas Ohlson.
Furthermore, op5 has a courteous staff and has provided great support and quick response. On some occasions, we have taken on a consultancy basis using them to encode more difficult monitoring features, such as integration with BizTalk” Jan Larsson concludes.
op5 Monitor is a robust and reliable system, it is easy to build your own plug-ins, trend reporting allows one to work proactively and have full redundancy for maximum uptime.
About Clas Ohlson
The mail order business that Clas Ohlson started in 1918 in Insjön is now an established European retail business.There are about three thousand staff working in Sweden, Norway, Finland and the UK who all follow the company motto “Making things easier for people to solve their everyday practical problems”. For more information, see www.clasohlson.com.
Challenge:
Monitoring of applications, servers, communication equipment and logistics flows in BizTalk, in a mission-critical environment.
op5 solution:
op5 Monitor connected to 4700 monitoring points. Report module for proactive monitoring management and load balancing for 99.999% uptime.
Result:
Clas Ohlson can act quickly and with very precise response to disruptions, and they can catch the problems before they causes interferences.
