Customer Profile – MRO Supply Chain Company
This 45-year-old company takes a holistic approach to optimizing the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) supply chain. The company helps organizations streamline their processes, improve efficiency, and scale their operations for an integrated supply chain that ensures MRO optimization. By reducing costs, improving inventory management, and enhancing overall performance, the company has become a recognized leader in MRO supply chain services in North America. They have successfully implemented programs at over 1,500 facilities.
Business Challenges
A digital supply chain provider was highly-dependent on its outdated network infrastructure to deliver its core offering to customers. The company’s legacy network posed several limitations:
- Inflexible and Inefficient: Dependence on specific carriers and infrastructure impacted company operations and the end-user experience.
- Lack of 5G Preparedness: The company needed to incorporate 4G LTE wireless connectivity to improve redundancy in the short term while providing a future-proof migration path to 5G.
- Business Continuity Risk: Due to its network resiliency issues, the company faced an unacceptable level of risk to its continued operations, jeopardizing customer service.
Ultimately, the company needed a solution that incorporated software- defined networking and delivered improved performance, redundancy, availability, and security, addressing all their current challenges.
The Globalgig Solution
This service provider selected Globalgig as the partner to design and implement a new SD-WAN that would achieve its business objectives. Globalgig’s methodology for successful WAN deployments begins with the discovery phase. The Globalgig engineering team deployed a NetFlow-based analysis tool to evaluate application traffic and baseline performance.¹ This study allowed Globalgig to define local policy, application-aware routing policies, and failover behavior. The discovery process also included a review of additional network behavior and future needs assessments to ensure that the proposed solution would meet the defined business objectives. Globalgig engaged with the customer’s internal stakeholders and end-users to document success criteria and ideal outcomes.
After evaluating various platforms, Globalgig recommended a Fortinet- based SD-WAN solution. Globalgig organized and managed workshops to create the high-level design with key stakeholders, then delivered detailed design documentation for final approval.
The project was implemented in two phases:
Phase 1: Highly-available FortiGate appliances were installed in various company locations, including a backup data center, the Amazon Web Services environment, and the Oracle Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud environment.²
Phase 2: FortiGate appliances were deployed at branch offices and integrated into the new security fabric. The design and engineering teams optimized and documented the onboarding process for the remaining and future branch offices.
Globalgig played a crucial role in this large-scale implementation by providing invaluable assistance. A project manager and project engineer offered Day 1 support, while the engineering team efficiently managed the upgrade to the new operational SD-WAN at each data center and office location.
Results – A Secure, Resilient Foundation for the Future
By transforming its network from end-to-end, this digital supply chain provider gained powerful advantages, including:
- Transformation to a high-availability SD-WAN network.
- Highly-secure access to business systems hosted at the company’s data centers.
- Improved network and content security through a single platform that leverages shared intelligence.
- Lower network service costs.
- Easier network management, reducing the IT team’s network-related workload and
improving their efficiency. - End-to-end solution, covering every aspect from design to project implementation and ongoing network management.