Bottler Gains End User and IT Team Productivity with Network Management​

Sibeg improves business continuity by switching from manual application monitoring to WhatsUp Gold's automated network management system.

Sibeg is the authorized Sicilian bottler in charge of the production, distribution, regional marketing, and advertising of The Coca-Cola Company drinks, actively contributing to the development and management of the Coca-Cola brand. The organization’s vision is to be the leader in the Sicilian beverage market by focusing on expanding distribution strategies, new business opportunities, innovation, environmental considerations, employee development, and manufacturing in compliance with quality standards at the lowest possible cost.

Enrico D’Arrigo, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Network Administrator, joined Sibeg in 2003. At the time, ICT did not have a network management solution in place so the team was manually monitoring the network on a problem-by-problem basis. This challenged the team to provide quality service to their business users, so ICT decided to purchase what the team defined as “a proactive monitoring and problem-prevention tool.”

Improve Business Operations

In 2005, Sibeg purchased WhatsUp Gold to improve business continuity, prevent outages, reduce response time, and guarantee the best service to their end users. Sibeg has two hundred employees working in the Catania head office and eighty field salespeople who remotely access the network to place orders online.

Today, WhatsUp Gold helps ICT prevent problems with business-critical application servers, and monitors the status of WAN connections to remote locations. With the latest upgrade, Sibeg also monitors their Cisco wireless infrastructure. With WhatsUp Gold, ICT can now proactively respond and quickly remediate performance events before they impact the business.

As an example, the application that transfers digital documents from the organization’s SAP system to their document management system (DMS) uses a network share for the exchange of data. If the service stops or disk space runs out, the documents produced from SAP cannot be transferred to the DMS, which means users won’t have access to the latest information. WhatsUp Gold lets ICT monitor the service and the disk space to ensure that the documents are immediately and consistently available to business users. “An increase in server availability and uptime reduces the cost of doing business because our users are always productive,” comments Enrico.

Sibeg also has a Lot Tracking System (LTS) that tracks production. The LTS is integrated with SAP, and these two systems communicate through an IDocs interface. WhatsUp Gold is used to monitor the status of the communication between SAP and the LTS.

Comments Enrico, “The bottom line is that WhatsUp Gold keeps our end users productive so that we maintain high quality manufacturing and distribution standards and meet our deadlines – all of which are important to help us improve our service to our consumers and ultimately increase our market share.”

Improve ICT Team Productivity

In addition to delivering better service and improved uptime to end users, WhatsUp Gold has also improved the productivity of the ICT team in three ways:

• ICT now has one single point of control to monitor the network and it is available to the entire team. Prior to WhatsUp Gold, the ICT team had to manually check the networks and applications, problem-by-problem.
• The availability of predictive analysis and real-time root cause identification means the ICT staff spend less time finding a problem and are able to fix it quickly.
• Since WhatsUp Gold monitors the network day-to-day, the ICT team members are freed up to handle exceptions and more important projects.

There are also some WhatsUp Gold features that are important to the Sibeg ICT team. First, WhatsUp Gold’s Alerts and Actions forewarn ICT about critical problems so staff can respond before the business users are impacted. And WhatsUp Gold’s ability to track inter-device and intra-device dependencies means that the team gets the right alerts, not just any and all alerts (including those that are inconclusive).

Second, WhatsUp Gold lets Sibeg connect unlimited monitors and interfaces on each device. Enrico explains, “We can modify our monitoring strategy and add and change monitors without acquiring additional licenses. This lets our team stay agile and gives us the ability to quickly respond to changing business and market conditions.”

"The bottom line is that WhatsUp Gold keeps our end users productive so that we maintain high quality manufacturing​ and distribution standards and meet our deadlines."

Enrico D’Arrigo ICT Network Administrator