“IT is an integral part of service in our business. Choosing Centreon brought us the benefit of a single, centralized monitoring platform to oversee a hybrid IT estate. We have improved visibility and proactivity in ensuring the right data is available at the right time, the key for optimized customer experience.” – Olivier Hamel, DSI Technical Solutions Activity Leader, FM Logistic Corporate SAS.
Summary
A leader in a constantly evolving and highly competitive industry, FM Logistic provides global supply chain solutions to national and international businesses in a range of sectors, from consumer goods, distribution, perfumes and cosmetics, to manufacturing and health—helping clients with end-to-end supply chain optimization. FM Logistic is a family business founded in France in 1967, currently active in 14 countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The company employs some 27,500 people and posted sales of 1.4 billion euros for 2019-2020.
Every single day, IT plays a strategic role in business operations, and ITSM teams need to ensure the right data is available at the right time to both internal users and customers. With IT service more than ever integrated into the service portfolio, and considering the company is moving towards a hybrid IT system, the adoption of a centralized IT monitoring platform was becoming an absolute necessity. IT teams needed a shared platform capable of monitoring any type of infrastructure (Cloud, SaaS and on premises). The IT department selected Centreon for the deployment of a holistic and fully integrated solution encompassing 180 logistics platforms.
The choice brought real benefits: an efficient approach to monitor the full scope of IT assets and uncovering previously unseen optimization opportunities. Centralizing the monitoring data from hybrid infrastructure (legacy and cloud) also promoted higher visibility across the entire IT system, enabling teams to be more proactive in improving user and customer experiences. Beyond increasing the operational efficiency of ITSM teams, Centreon sparked a new monitoring practice that aligns IT with actual business workflows, tracking a new set of KPIs that correlate IT and business metrics.
Project Key Facts
Business Challenges:
- Aligning IT and business objectives to guarantee operational excellence
- Ensuring the right data is available at the right time
- Optimizing the customer experience through frictionless data access
ITOM Challenges:
- Setting up a solution capable of evolving at the same pace as the company’s and IT department’s digital transformation
- Unifying the view on a complex IT ecosystem
- Optimizing user experience and availability of applications for clients
- Tracking new indicators combining IT and business metrics
Main Benefits:
- Highlighted areas for performance enhancement, which had never been previously identified
- Provided immediate visibility over all sites, regardless of infrastructure type (SaaS , Cloud and On—Premise)
- Improved alignment of IT and business through metrics correlating IT and business data
- More proactivity and responsiveness in improving the customer and user experience
The full story
In a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment, FM Logistic provides global solutions to help customers with end-to-end supply chain optimization. Every single day, IT plays a strategic role in business operations, and ITSM teams need to ensure the right data is available at the right time to both internal users and customers. The IT department chose Centreon to develop a unified platform overseeing a complex IT estate (Cloud, SaaS and on premises). The decision immediately provided benefits: higher visibility, more proactive teams, and improved user and customer experiences.
FM Logistic: Solutions for a Sustainable Supply Chain and Better Quality of Life
A family business founded in France in 1967, FM Logistic provides supply chain services that meet the rising needs of online commerce, omnichannel distribution, and sustainable consumption. The company serves a balanced portfolio of international and national clients in the consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, perfumes and cosmetics, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors. Present in 14 countries across Europe, Asia and Latin America, FM Logistic employs some 27,500 people and posted sales of 1.4 billion euros in 2019-2020.
FM Logistic’s IT department counts 350 people spread at various locations across the globe. Olivier Hamel and his team are responsible for the technical architecture, support, and production for the group’s 183 sites. In this highly competitive and fast-paced sector, the IT department faces new challenges every day. “FM Logistic manages multiple delivery channels and a diversified range of products,” says Olivier. “Our teams need to be able to deliver both homogeneous pallets to warehouses in industrial areas and execute orders for multiple smaller packages distributed to shops in city downtown cores.”
Business Challenges: Accessing the Right Data at the Right Time and Using It to Effect Operational Excellence
Logistics is undergoing a deep transformation. The rise of e-commerce, omnichannel retail, and the growing expectations for sustainable development are forcing logistics leaders to reengineer both their processes and their operations (zero emission vehicles for urban delivery, traceability, tracking of deliveries, etc.). Digital transformation also changed customer behaviors—at work or at home, they’re using the same technology. “Fifteen years ago our clients were using PCs. Today it’s mobile devices,” explains Olivier.
“Traceability and real time expectations have evolved. Data availability and our ability to add value are now table stakes. Clients expect us to provide the right data at the right time so that they can integrate it into their own IT chain and provide the data to their end customers. IT is now an integral part of our service offering.”
ITOM issues: Ensuring Availability and Visibility in the Midst of IT Transformation
Providing useful, just-in-time data is a crucial part of providing real-time visibility on order flows and on delivery processes, helping with overall customer experience optimization. “Not only do we need to make the data available almost instantly, we need to add value to it, through offering new services via digital applications integrating AI, for example,” emphasizes Olivier. However, if the IT department is well into the digital era, Olivier’s team still have to maintain the harmonious coexistence of digital and legacy applications. “Meeting the needs of the business’s dynamic growth requires intensifying cloud infrastructure adoption—but not everything can go into the cloud.”
“We need to manage a technological legacy—including older generation applications, while the modern consumer expect a continuous flow of information. This highlights the need for a unified and centralized vision of our IT.”
The project: Centralizing IT Monitoring Across Sites and Infrastructure Types (on premises, cloud and SaaS)
Whether it’s making deliveries, tracing fresh products or ensuring regulatory compliance for certain products or installations, it can’t be done without IT infrastructure and teams performing at their best. In 2018, Olivier Hamel’s team was looking to evolve the IT monitoring system and started the search for a new solution. “Before we could even think of managing data in real time, we had to ensure optimal functioning of the IT system and track application availability for our clients, in order to provide the best possible user experience.”
“We took a pragmatic approach: Cloud monitoring tools work perfectly within the cloud environment. But we needed to look beyond the cloud to adopt a commercial monitoring platform that could consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps, managing all metrics across domains: cloud, SaaS and on premises, which Centreon allows.”
Centreon won the most votes and was deployed in less than 4 months over a large estate, covering networks, databases, systems, and selected business applications.
Results: A Holistic View of IT Aligned to Business Objectives and Operations
From the first day of its adoption, the solution has met its objectives. “The fact the system was immediately running at its best and with the intended functionalities was a game changer for us,” recalls Olivier. “We could then enrich the platform with a mapping module for dashboards and BAM (business activity monitoring) to cover for the application side. We also interfaced the solution with the ticketing tool (Request Tracker), providing additional context.”
Among the business applications the team monitors are the warehouse management application (WMS) and the transport management system (TMS), both having a decisive impact on the overall performance of the company. As for applications in the cloud, we’re focused on interconnecting tools. For example, the Google suite is monitored using dedicated tools and relevant metrics are integrated and consolidated within the Centreon monitoring platform, which is how IT teams can break the silos that often hinder full monitoring of the IT system, whether it’s on premises, SaaS or cloud.
Two additional benefits were appreciated by the team: the holistic visibility within an integrated platform and from a single access point, and being able to further optimize the IT system after the monitoring platform highlighted problems that had previously been hidden from view. Centreon shone a new light on the workings of the IT system, as Olivier explains:
“Integrating new metrics is much easier because we can correlate data from multiple sources, device-based, business workflows and applicative—Thus we benefit from a renewed vision on the systems that drive business. We can finally correlate IT with business processes.”
The team can now tell if the IT system and its performance are affected by a surge in orders—and why it is happening. This is made possible through the use of the full scope of Centreon capabilities (including the mapping service, Centreon BAM, that will soon be extended to the WMS and TMS solutions), and through sharing data with the entire IT department, using dashboards displayed on large screens.
IT monitoring for the company’s complete IT estate is centralized at head office while each local business units across the globe benefitting from delegated access to the monitoring platform to check on their own systems.
“We chose to use all of Centreon’s functionalities because each play a distinct role in helping us respond and react in a timely manner. It was also necessary to be able to finely measure and understand the health of systems, through advanced KPIs. What is not measured cannot be controlled.
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