Ahlsell

11 million in sales per hour. Downtime is unthinkable.

Ahlsell has a multi-outsourcing strategy and works with six different suppliers who run its applications and are responsible for its communication systems.

Radar proactively monitors six outsourcing providers

With the Radar system, developed by Qlosr, Ahlsell gets a complete picture of its IT system, and can quickly identify and remedy any disruptions that occur.

Ahlsell is a leader in the Nordic region in installation products and offers professional users a wide range of goods and services within the product areas of Plumbing, Electricity and Tools & Machinery.

Facts

• BSEK 21 in net sales
• 4 800 employees
• 110 000 active customers
• 15 000 active suppliers
• 150 000 orders per day
• 1 000 000 items

Challenges/problems

• Minimise downtimes for critical IT systems
• Suppliers blame each other

Solutions

• Multi-outsourcing strategy
• Rg19’s Radar system for monitoring

Ahlsell IT – a fulfilment company

To support Ahlsell’s business operations, they collaborate with some 20 application suppliers, the largest of which is Aptean (formerly Industri-Matematik), which deliver Supply Chain, Webshop, and CRM systems.

Other important applications are Astro WMS (Consafe), Transport Management and Track & Trace (Centiro), PIM (Stibo), Shop & Drop (Information Factory), IFS Finance, the Cognos reporting tool, Microsoft, and EDI (Sterling Commerce).

Ahlsell IT, primarily a fulfilment company, consists of 14 people in four countries and ten different locations. They communicate mostly via Microsoft Lync. For the past 14 years, the virtual organisation has been led by CIO Kenneth Larsson.

Radar – monitoring of suppliers and systems

Ahlsell want to avoid situations where one outsourcing provider might blame another, so they have decided to use the Radar system to have total control over their six outsourcing providers.

Radar gives them a complete picture of their IT and communications system, enabling them to quickly identify any disruptions that arise and initiate corrective measures as soon as possible.

Results

• Proactive monitoring
• Rapid response to any disruptions
• Stable IT environment with a high degree of accessibility
• Cost-effective IT management

Detects incidents

Radar does not resolve issues, but detects incidents that are occurring or about to occur. Today, Radar is designed primarily for the IT department, which monitor all servers, routers, switches, and the underlying LANs in the four Nordic countries from their laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Via e-mail, they are currently notified of abnormal events that may require different types of actions. They can, for example, see the average response times for the respective router.

Radar warns and alerts

Radar is used as a reminder alarm, as warnings and error messages also go to the various outsourcing partners depending on which systems indicate some type of error or warning.

There are different SLAs, depending on how business-critical the systems are, and for the most critical systems, the SLA is tough. We are talking about a maximum of 60 minutes of downtime in a month. Should the downtime reach 60 minutes and one second, severe penalties start to add up.

“As we are selling for 11 million SEK an hour, a serious stop could result in big losses for Ahlsell. In the 14 years I’ve been here, however, this has only happened a handful of times,” says Kenneth Larsson, CIO.

How is efficiency measured?

“If we did not have Radar, we would be at the mercy of the suppliers instead of sitting behind the wheel. We need to be proactive so that suppliers do not blame each other and nothing happens,” says Kenneth Larsson.

By having Radar, good contracts and tough SLAs, Kenneth is convinced that they at least cut the downtime of serious incidents in half. So instead of being down for two hours, their system is up and running within an hour.

Radar has jokingly been nicknamed “PIA” (Pain In the Ass), as it constantly monitors suppliers and IT systems with an eagle eye and can thus identify incidents and get the problem solving started quickly. In this way, it gains a high level of attention from suppliers, which is important for rapid problem solving.

Rg19 as Supplier

“Rg19 has many competent employees, is business-oriented, and delivers cost-effective services. They run the CRM system ‘Ahead’ for 3 000 users and it works stably and well. Soon they will also launch a mobile version of Radar for tablets and smart-phones, which we are looking forward to,” says Kenneth Larsson.