Success Story

BoostEdge Helps an SMB, Ark-Les, Do a Day's Work

Description of the Business

Ark-Les is one of those SMBs (small-medium businesses) you may never have heard of, not because it isn’t a leader in its industry, but because it is a privately held smaller company. And because it manufactures components that go into brand name dishwashers, washing machines and dryers, among other products, for such giants as GE, Whirlpool and Maytag, you may never see the Ark-les label. But Ark-Les' competitive advantage is that it manages its supply chain exceedingly well—meeting the just-in-time demands of its customers for the electro-mechanical switches and controls that make home appliances, hand tools and automobiles run correctly.

The Problem

In order to maintain that competitive edge, Ark-Les needed to web-enable its manufacturing system, upgrading from client-server technology to PeopleSoft's JD Edwards OneWorld Xe, release 8.1. Despite, careful planning, the process of implementing OneWorld Xe showed that going into full production would cause an instant disaster. According to Mark Daughtrey, Ark-Les’ Director of Information Technology, ". . . throughput screeched to a halt. We could not go live unless we could solve this problem." Response time for fewer than 50 concurrent users worldwide plummeted to an unacceptable 15-20 seconds per page at Ark-Les" four US plants and factories in Mexico and China. Opening a 200-page report took 4 minutes.

Solving the Problem

Ark-Les tried using software-based compression on its WebSphere server. The amount of data reduction was trivial and consumed too many processing cycles. Adding compression to its routers could barely attain a 2X reduction in data flow, hardly sufficient to impact response time. Ark-Les found that the capital cost of the equipment was prohibitive. Moreover, it would have meant “. . . hands having to touch each router while in production,” a management burden with the potential for high ongoing operating costs. Upgrading the routers at each site would also have seriously delayed the project. Doubling bandwidth was also considered. This alternative was also found to be cost-prohibitive and upgrading its VPN would also have taken many months to implement. Ark-Les asked ActivNetworks to sponsor a test of its BoostEdge appliance. Because BoostEdge is inserted transparently to users, servers and other elements in the data chain, Ark-Les was able to safely test this alternative in the production environment. Installed in less than an hour, Ark-Les was able to immediately assess the impact of BoostEdge on real users. Adding one user then several, then all its “super-users,” BoostEdge showed an immediate beneficial effect on response time and user productivity. There were no untoward side effects and no administrative burden outside of gathering and assessing data. Ark-Les opted to purchase a BoostEdge 600 to solve its problem.

Benefits

The main objective, high user performance to meet the strategic objective of supply chain excellence was instantly achieved. Response time for end users improved from 15-20 seconds to 3-4 seconds using BoostEdge. Reports, which had been taking 4 minutes to access, now took only 12 seconds! These results were realized because dataflow over the WAN was reduced by 4.5X. According to Mark Daughtrey, “We can now accomplish one day’s work in one day. The small investment in BoostEdge allows us to completely realize the proper return on investment in our PeopleSoft-JD Edwards system upgrade. And for us on the IT side, we are preserving our server’s capacity with almost no administrative attention.”