Case Study

When Renold Chain decided to bring its disaster recovery in-house, it turned to LifeIT team members to supply a product that would support both its European and eventually trans-Atlantic operations. 

Renold Chain is an international engineering group, producing a wide range of precision engineering products. It manufactures and sells industrial chains and related power transmission products, automotive cam drive systems and specialist machine tools and rotors. The company’s Headquarters are based in Manchester, UK, with sales offices in 17 countries and manufacturing operations in 6 countries.  In 2004-2005 it achieved sales of £197 million and employed 2700 staff worldwide.

IT Requirements

Based on years of positive experience with Intentia’s Movex ERP applications, Renold Chain took a strategic decision to deploy Movex ERP solutions over a worldwide manufacturing capability. The global deployment  increased the demands on their systems, to the point that the global challenge would require the introduction of 24/7 system availability.  For Renold Chain, this is business critical stuff with goods inwards, manufacturing and sales processes all supported by the system.

First move in ensuring 24/7 availability is to deploy to the right platform; Renold selected the IBM iSeries platform from which to deploy the Movex Applications. The project involved reducing the multiple versions of Movex in various countries to a single globally approved version ensuring data, from each country was current, accurate and available 24 hours a day.

As part of their strategy re-evaluation Renold took the step to bring their disaster recovery effort in house; having historically engaged a third party DR specialist Renold realised they might not  be viewed as a priority customer  if they had to compete for resources against large financial institutions. Renold realised they could capitalise on the existence of their global presence by spreading IT risk around their organisation, creating a resilient server environment in the process. To accomplish this ambitious goal they needed to deploy a High Availability solution that would meet high performance specifications against a tight budget.

Jem Clayton, IS Manager for Reynold Chain had created a brief against which to measure the various HA solutions reviewed as part of the due diligence phase of the project. Jem finally found the right product at an IT roadshow; the product was demonstrated by Life IT’s Technical Director John Amans. Jem immediately realised he’d found an exciting product that would meet all his needs: “We had looked at lots of systems over the past two years, but then we attended a roadshow and came across a product that appeared to tick all the boxes”

To help Jem in the selection process, the team at Renold Chain were given a web-enabled remote demonstration of *noMAX; the interactive demonstration allowed Jem’s team to quiz the *noMAX operator live by phone at any time.  Jem Clayton wasn’t the only one who was impressed, Graham Lockwood, Systems Manager told us:  “After seeing *noMAX in action we couldn’t really believe that it was that simple, but in reality it is”

The *noMAX team at LifeIT were able to arrange a reference site visit for Jem and his team to a company where *noMAX is successfully and reliably mirroring over 1 million transactions a day.  After completing their due diligence appraisal Jem Clayton and his colleagues decided *noMAX would be suitable to provide the backbone to Renold Chain’s HA & DR strategy.  In order to ensure the highest levels of reliability, using *noMAX, the core servers based in Stockport and Einbeck (Germany) are identical and can be role-swapped on a regular basis, to prove the solution.

Although the primary drivers for Renold Chain were performance, reliability and flexibility, naturally price is always an issue and the team at Renold Chain were delighted to find the product that most met their needs represented a much more tolerable investment than any other product seriously reviewed.

Deployment

Designing the communications infrastructure represented a minor challenge all of its own. Following the successful merger of the two European ERP systems, when Renold Chain completed their sizing exercise and mapped their data capture requirements they found they were looking at something like 6 million transactions per day. To ensure performance, should any leg of the resilient infrastructure fail, all parts had to be properly sized to ensure tolerable reliability in all conditions. The Renold Chain ERP database currently holds over 60GB of raw data. In terms of a live dataset this represents an important business asset, its value to the business being contingent on system availability - loss of access to this key information would have seriously damaged the business. With a solid HA system in place, the team at Renold Chain can rest assured they’ve protected their investment.

Why the Life IT team?

Renold Chain’s problems were complex; Multi Version Manufacturing ERP, Multi Site, Multi Country, Multi-Language across complex networking infrastructure.  Renold Chain wanted a partner that could deliver the experience and the technical capability to achieve all the strategic goals that were so important to this company.

Renold adapted and redefined its corporate communications infrastructure ensuring they were ready to handle significant volumes of business-critical data.

During the project, LifeIT’s *noMAX team (one of the largest in Britain) became a part of Jem Clayton’s project team, with responsibility for ensuring Renold Chain’s *noMAX needs are met in a professional and efficient manner.  “With Life’s support the process of implementing and supporting the new system has been significantly less complicated than we expected and we feel we have been in control of the project all along.”

Business Benefits

Using *noMAX Renold Chain will be able to fulfil its ambition to bring all European Countries on the same highly-available fault-tolerant system. The next phase of the plan is to expand this proven solution to include the North American subsidiaries within the group.

Key Benefits
	In-house managed HA/DR solution replicating business critical data in real time.
	A scalable solution that can be added to as new business units are incorporated into the system.
	6 million transactions a day
	Exceptional Value for Money – Excellent ROIs show system paid for by elimination of third party DR costs
	Renold has 1 core primary system based in Stockport and a target machine based in Einbeck, Germany.
	Renold now have the foundation of a high availability ERP system to which the remaining European offices are being added and one which will eventually enable Renold to integrate its operations in North America and Canada.