Manufacturer Assures Production Apps in Remote Factories With NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance Visibility to Global Plants
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution
- InfiniStreamNG appliances
- nGenius Packet Flow Switches
Tech Stack
- Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
- Google Meets
- Google Docs
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
The customer is a U.S.-based, global manufacturer that produces heavy-duty equipment under multiple brand names. With production plants in more than a dozen countries, the company has held their organization to high-quality standards in industrial processes to maintain their reputation as a world-class manufacturer. Timeliness and productivity are critical to meeting quota goals and objectives in both their parts manufacturing and final assembly plants for local delivery to sales channels and end-users. Digital transformation had been a strategic initiative for this manufacturer over the last several years, having invested in software-defined networking with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology in their data centers, as well as cloud-based collaborations services with Google Meets and Google Docs. To ensure quality end-user experience with the new technologies and all their other network and application services, the IT organization had a long-standing relationship with their service assurance partner NETSCOUT.
The Challenge
The manufacturer was facing performance issues with their plant floor performance management service (PFS) application, which is crucial for specifying feature options for the equipment, tracking the building and assembly processes, performing quality checks at the end of production, and noting repairs if they were required. The IT staff had visibility to evaluate and troubleshoot issues with this application in the data centers. However, once it hit the carrier’s MPLS network, there was a gap in visibility into application performance in the production plants that complicated IT’s ability to assure quality delivery was maintained throughout the entire communications cycle. As issues with this application were increasing in some of the plants, it became a priority for IT to gain visibility to investigate and resolve the problems before production schedules were further impacted.
The Solution
The IT team for this manufacturer turned to NETSCOUT to determine the best approach to gain visibility at their worldwide factories. Following analysis of the network and application infrastructures at the plants, they decided to use an nGenius Packet Flow Switch to tap key segments in the local plant data center to send copies of network traffic to their monitoring devices. They targeted the segment coming in from the MPLS provider, also known as the WAN Network Edge, since this location would give them visibility and control at the point where traffic was passed to a third party. They also targeted the core of the factory data center in the application server farm, also known as the data center Service Edge, to monitor the high concentration of critical conversations in this part of the network. Smart data from the ISNG appliances in the plants was analyzed using the nGeniusONE solution centralized in the manufacturer’s headquarters. The IT staff, along with a Premium Service Support Engineer (PSE) from NETSCOUT, had configured dashboards and workflows to tackle some of the issues the factory personnel had been grappling with, specifically, the delays and disruptions in their PFS application.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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