Global beverage brand refreshes mission-critical platforms to ensure retail stores are stocked for customer demands before holidays

One of the largest beverage brands in the world operating in tens of thousands of retail locations across the globe and employing hundreds of thousands of people.

The client uses IBM Power Systems to run its centralized inventory management and financial reporting systems for all its stores. The software ensures that each store has the inventory required to meet customer demand. Concerns that aging IBM Power7 systems could no longer support demand and an approaching end-of-service-life coupled with the challenge of being an international powerhouse operating a global 24-7 business making no one upgrade timeslot a convenient option, this brand needed to carefully plan its approach to minimize potential disruption to its stores and its customers.

Ensono presented a solution that involved completely refreshed IBM Power9 hardware which was a huge leap in performance compared to the old system and had capacity to accommodate future growth. Ensono was also able to scope out a new DevTest environment to provide the ability to undertake more rigorous stress testing before rolling out code to production. By staggering the migration, Ensono worked to minimize downtime and ensured the upgrades coincided with what was calculated to be the quietest times minimizing disruption to stores. 

• Completed migration in six months and before holiday period
• DevTest environment can stress test production code against 10,000 stores
• Time to complete batch jobs reduced by up to 40%
• CPU utilization on the server reduced by up to 20%