Freedom Managed services
Freedom Furniture selected Perfaware as their partner to provide full end-to-end production support of their IBM Order Management System. This would include not only the core OMS environment, but also all of the middleware and infrastructure supporting all aspects of the integrated solution. The goal of this engagement was to ensure near 100% up-time and to virtually eliminate loss of revenue due to preventable down-time.
About Freedom Furniture
Freedom Furniture wanted to leverage the ability of Perfaware’s off-shore operations to plug a gap in the support of their IBM Sterling OMS environments from 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM IST thus ensuring 24X7 overall support. They wanted Perfaware to augment their support capabilities and to provide value-added activities that were more labor intensive to relieve their on-shore teams from these tasks leaving them to focus on more business-focused activities. The small team of specialists consisted of a Sr. OMS Consultant, an OMS Support Consultant, and one Junior Support Consultant.
Perfaware Strategy and Execution
There were a number of support activities Perfaware provided that spanned the entire OMS eco-system including all of the Application Servers, Agent Servers, and Integration Servers, in addition to the infrastructure and middleware components. These activities included start/stopping services, triggering agents at designated intervals, monitoring all the components of the system, monitoring log files including OMS logs and Splunk logs, and responding to any health check alerts generated by the monitoring environments.
Not only was Perfware responsible for managing the overall system health, but they also played an active role in managing some of the fall-out at an application level, such as hold resolutions and managing the exception console to facilitate the re-processing of messages that failed to process due to Java exceptions in lower middleware components.
Business Challenge
- Freedom Furniture had many standard operating procedures that each of the team members had to engage with and become proficient in.
- The Freedom Furniture team needed a number of knowledge transfer events to help them streamline some of their support activities and to make both teams more efficient.
Results
The eight month engagement helped Freedom Furniture establish a solid support foundation such that they could hire a dedicated off-shore team that was able to take over the support role in the IST time zone