By using the full potential of the Qondoc Alarm Management system, the global corporation Alfa Laval is now able to monitor all their IT environment alarm alerts more efficiently and save a great deal of money at the same time.
Requirements With operations in seven regions worldwide, Alfa Laval helps their customers heat, cool, separate and transport products such as oil, water, chemicals, beverages, foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals. Though Alfa Laval is a global corporation, their vital IT installations – approximately 200 servers supported by a large AS400 server with 12 partitions – is located in Lund, Sweden.
Previously, several separate management systems were used, such as Microsoft Operations Manager, HP Insight Manager, Dell Open Manager, SolarWinds Orion and AS400 Monitoring. This resulted in a complicated alarm management process with an increased error potential, which is why Alfa Laval was looking for new comprehensive solutions that would automate, optimize and stabilize their alarm management procedures.
”We were looking for a supplier that could offer an integrated system, one that would manage alerts from our various management systems,” Jan-Åke Hultén, System Engineer, Corporate IT Global IT Services at Alfa Laval in Lund explains.
The solution
Qondoc Alarm Management provides Alfa Laval with an effective tool to integrate their various management system options and centralise alarm management in a single, user-friendly application. ”We definitely found what we were looking for. Instead of responding to alerts through several different systems and databases, we can use a single interface and no alerts will fall between the cracks. Previously, critical alerts might occasionally get “lost” along the way,” Jan-Åke Hultén reports.
Qondoc Alarm Management collects alerts from all the different sources at Alfa Laval by way of ”listeners”, and the staff on duty at that particular time is notified directly by way of a text message. In addition this, the Qondoc system provides up-to-date reports and historic data about each individual alarm situation for easy analysis.
Alfa Laval is also provided with a flexible schedule that details the skills of each employee on duty. This makes it easy for the company to plan schedules months in advance, and all the pertinent data is fed into a single application. Alfa Laval now has a tool that can prioritise alarms in accordance with pre-determined criteria and manage several alerts simultaneously – Alfa Laval may have some 20 to 30 alarm situations at the same time.
”This ensures that no alerts are left unmanaged. Alfa Laval is planning to establish IT departments like the one we have in Lund in the US and in Asia as well. That means we will need the same type of alarm management as we have in Sweden. Qondoc Alarm Management will certainly help us deal with these extensive and complex installations,” Jan-Åke Hultén explains.
Centralised data management
”This system allows us to eliminate human error, which was a problem when we were using five different monitoring systems. A centralised alarm management system means that we only have to perform a particular operation once.”
Improved automatic text-messaging communication
”Now, alerts can be transmitted by way of text messages regardless of the source. This improves our odds of locating the best-suited employees on duty. No top-priority alerts will be put on hold.”
Operational benefits
Alfa Laval’s alarm management is consolidated. Alarm situations are automatically assessed and assigned to the right professional. The system minimizes the risk of missing alerts, and it provides efficient follow-up procedures and documentation of individual alarm scenarios.