Case Study
“We now get real-time warnings about network problems before our business units even realize there’s an issue. Netreo increases the speed of our IT group’s reaction time. It’s all about repositioning IT to be continuously proactive in supporting the business.”
In 1918, the founders of Twin Disc invented a new form of power transmission technology — an advanced clutch for farm tractors and construction equipment. Since then, the company has been developing, engineering, manufacturing, and distributing power transmission products for tractors, cranes, commercial trucks, emergency vehicles, boats, pumps, turbines, and more.
“Our company is a $285 million operation with 1,000 employees. Manufacturing plants are located in North America, Europe, and Asia with 18 worldwide locations delivering parts and services to 100 distributors and thousands of customers,” said Cory Mason, Director of Global Information Technology for Twin Disc. “At our corporate headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, we maintain a lean IT operation — just eleven IT people to support our entire enterprise and extended ecosystem with an IT budget of around 1.5% of net sales.”
Mason’s IT services group provides 24×7 user support for all of the company’s employees, operating systems, hardware systems, and network connectivity services, along with overall IT systems management and coordination.
“Our facilities in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific depend on our IT team to deliver continuous, reliable enterprise systems performance. Information Technology is like an electric utility to them — they assume it’s always going to be there when they need it, and they depend on that assurance. So, we have to fully leverage every second of our available IT staff hours by having the right technology tools to maximize our effectiveness,” Mason said.
Several years ago, Mason created a strategic IT plan based on a hub-and-spoke model, with two U.S. sites linked via fiber and redundant network pathways serving as a private cloud for all worldwide IT operations and business processes. This included an email repository, fully redundant data warehouse, and network servers for manufacturing, engineering, administration, sales, and marketing.
“A key part of our strategic plan was a robust monitoring solution with the specific management functionality we needed, plus the ability to alert our staff if a problem developed at any of our locations anywhere in the world,” Mason noted.
“We looked around and found a number of options, including CiscoWorks, Cisco Prime Infrastructure, HP OpenView, Microsoft Operations Manager, and an IT operations solution from Hitachi Data Systems. After evaluating each of these, we found that they were very expensive and complex to implement — or were narrowly focused on a single type of network, server, or software. In short, they just didn’t meet our functional needs.”
After selecting Netreo, the Twin Disc team was able to connect about 70% of the company’s IT infrastructure into the system within two weeks. In less than three months, 100% of the company’s critical IT assets were being monitored by Netreo.
“Netreo was very accommodating during the implementation, both in cost and availability. At Netreo, it seems there’s always someone available when you need them. They let you do as little or as much of the implementation as you want to do, and we really appreciated that.”
Twin Disc’s system administrators install patches and updates to their applications and servers as they become available, and they have had their share of painful installation experiences in the past. While Twin Disc was onboarding, Netreo released a software upgrade. Since implementation was underway, Mason’s people were reluctant to install the upgrade, but with Netreo’s encouragement they went ahead and the update was completed flawlessly in about 15 minutes.
“That was one of the best and fastest updates I’ve ever seen,” he said. “From a corporate perspective, our relationship with Netreo has been extraordinary since the beginning. And today, they’re still one of the best vendors we’ve worked with.”
When they originally implemented Netreo, Twin Disc installed a large-screen monitor in the master data center with a map depicting all of their offices around the world and current system status.
“The top part of this huge screen shows granular information such as bandwidth, network latency, server CPU utilization, and disk space — and the lower portion has a graphical world map of our offices and the health of the links connecting them. Each location is marked in green, yellow, or red, depending on its state. If any system is experiencing problems, the location of that system is highlighted on the map. Anyone in our data center is able to view our global IT status at a glance.”
Over a weekend, Netreo reported a failure in the network connection at Twin Disc’s offices in Tampa, Florida. The on-call IT staff member in Wisconsin was automatically notified, and determined that the problem was not within Twin Disc’s infrastructure, but with the network services provider in Tampa. The staff member contacted that vendor, who determined that they made an error when performing weekend maintenance on their own equipment.
“We were able to immediately detect that broken connection, find the cause, and get it resolved before it impacted our operations in any serious way,” Mason said. “When our business staff arrived at the Tampa office on Monday morning, they never even knew there had been an outage.”
During a financial controllers’ conference at Twin Disc headquarters, Mason invited visiting finance executives to tour the IT management offices.
“When they saw the Netreo world map on our 60-inch monitor, they were very impressed,” Mason recounted. “Our finance managers hadn’t realized what we were doing to monitor and protect the critical equipment and data in their shops. This demonstrated to these all-important stakeholders that our IT organization was on top of the situation, leveraging state-of-the-art solutions to help our company operate as efficiently and effectively as technologically possible. For me, as a part of the management team, that was priceless.”
Has Twin Disc’s investment in Netreo produced an acceptable ROI?
“There are several ways you could measure the ROI we’ve received from Netreo,” Mason said. “We could calculate operational cost savings by location, and that would vary from place to place. Or we could examine this subjectively and ask, ‘What’s it worth to have IT responding to issues four hours faster than before?’ It would be difficult to attach a hard ROI number to either of those analyses.”
For Mason, the critical ROI question is this: Is his team accomplishing its role in the enterprise and functioning as a good partner to the business units who rely on them to deliver continuous uptime, so that the company can perform as productively as possible?
“When you invest in a sophisticated tool like Netreo, you’re defining the philosophy on how you want the IT organization positioned within the enterprise. Do you want a reactive IT organization, or do you want to be proactive? We can’t redesign circuits to perform better than what our systems suppliers deliver to us. But when something goes down unexpectedly, we can be aware of it sooner and take action faster. That’s the difference that Netreo makes for us, and in my book, that’s a terrific result.”
Industry :
Heavy-duty vehicle power transmission equipment
Location :
Racine, WI, with offices in Europe and Asia
Twin Disc needed a single source of truth visibility into global IT infrastructure health and performance, with easy to interpret green, yellow and red status indicators for rapid IT response. A Netreo solution enabled continuous, 24×7, worldwide monitoring and proactive response to emerging problems at maximum ROI.
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