Reference no: EM133385982
Assignment:
With eight plants globally running from a single ERP instance on a server in Zeeland, Michigan, the IT team faced the challenges of scaling their systems to support the global growth fueling their company's expansion. Running IQMS' manufacturing ERP system delivered via Hosted Managed Services (HMS) provides Ventura Manufacturing the most economical system architecture for greater scalability and efficiency as well as to attain disaster recovery goals.
Ventura is an award-winning semi-automated assembly and production company that serves the automotive, office furniture, education seating, and molding and assembly of optical silicone industries globally. Headquartered in Zeeland, Michigan, the company has multiple plants in Zeeland in addition to plants in Budaörs, Hungary, Saltillo, Mexico and Shanghai, China.
As demand for Ventura's services grew and the company began attracting customers worldwide, it was apparent the dependency on a single ERP system on-premise in Zeeland, Michigan was becoming an impediment to faster growth. "Relying on a single system to manage our global plants was proving to be a huge scale challenge," said Joel Boyles, IT Team Lead at Ventura Manufacturing.
Ventura's customer base is globally-based and to serve them as responsively and effectively as possible, Ventura made the decision to open new production plants in Hungary and Shanghai, China.
With eight plants globally running from a single ERP instance on a server in Zeeland, Michigan, the IT team faced the challenges of scaling their systems to support the global growth fueling their company's expansion. The IT Teams at Ventura prides itself on offering live support to any plant, anywhere in the world that needs help, anytime. "When we just had the plants in Mexico and Hungary, our existing staff could scale to support the calls coming from plants for help with their IT systems and take care of ERP-related tasks," Joel said. When the Shanghai, China facility went online, Ventura was reaching the limits of scale and speed with their IT teams and the system running on-premise in Zeeland.
As demands increased on the system, so did concerns over Availability and Disaster Recovery Objectives the IT Team had defined. Two metrics that are of specific interest to Ventura's IT team are the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). IT defined the RTO goal as 8 hours and the RPO as 15 minutes, achievable on a 24/7 basis. To accomplish these goals, Ventura would need to create an entirely new system platform that could scale more efficiently with their growing business. The new platform would also need to increase the speed of system updates, which had been a problematic area in the past for the single system to complete.
Joel Boyles, IT Team Lead, says the challenges of scalability and disaster recovery are what drove the urgency for Ventura to decide that Hosted Managed Services (HMS) from IQMS was the best possible solution. "Plant system updates including MRP were taking at least 2 hours per plant, which translated into our IT teams having 24/7 shifts in our Zeeland-based IT offices," Joel said. "Clearly we had to redefine our system architecture for greater scalability and speed."
Ventura chose IQMS' Enterprise IQ delivered via Hosted Managed Services (HMS) because it was the most economical and fastest option for solving the system performance challenges and attaining the disaster recovery goals the company has. Under the IQMS HMS purchase option, software licenses are owned in perpetuity by Ventura and hardware and platform software is provided by the IQMS data center. IQMS is managing the Ventura systems today in a secure data center environment. Ventura's IT team can gain access to key system metrics and key performance indicators anytime via any browser-enabled laptop, tablet or smart phone.
Questions 1. How did Ventura Defined A Global Roadmap To Greater Speed And Reliability?