Press release:

IBM and TransWorks Collaborate to Help Louisiana-Pacific Corporation Achieve Supply Chain Efficiencies

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ARMONK, N.Y. - 05 Sep 2012:  IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Louisiana-Pacific Corporation (LP), a leading global manufacturer of high-quality building materials, has increased supply chain productivity with IBM technologies. IBM and TransWorks, a transportation and supply chain management provider based in Fort Wayne, IN, collaborated to simplify LP's supply chain operations, which ships from 20 plants to a wide customer base and large number of inventory locations.

Instead of a manual tracking system that wasted time and money, LP now has an automated solution that gives end-to-end visibility of orders, shipments and inventory.

TransWorks, an IBM Advanced Partner, provided LP with the Transportation Management- Supply Chain Execution Solution. The new system, deployed on IBM Informix Dynamic Server and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software running on IBM Power Systems servers, transports messages and automatically processes load offerings to LP’s carriers and tracks the progress of each load, while maintaining constant integrated communications between the carriers and shippers.

“With this new process, we’ve built a strong foundation of capabilities that allows us to focus our attention on delivering better, more consistent service to customers,” said Neil Sherman, Vice President of LP Procurement, Supply Chain & Logistics. “The Transportation Management- Supply Chain Execution Solution has enabled us to provide our carrier partners and operations team control across all levels of our supply chain to meet our clients' needs.”

Through this solution, LP has achieved greater control, visibility and optimization of its inbound supply and outbound fulfillment processes as well as its overall supply chain. Today, through the automated solution, LP has enhanced the management of workloads and improved overall supply chain and operational productivity by 75 percent.

“In order to succeed in today’s global marketplace and deliver value to consumers, supply chain decision makers must gain better control over supply chain operations,” said Susan Confort, Vice President of IBM Systems and Technology Global Industry Solutions & Marketing. “As IBM continues to develop powerful innovative technologies, we look forward to collaborating with IBM Business Partners who have the expertise to deliver greater value, control and innovation that matters to our clients in the retail and industrial sectors.”  

"We look forward to working with IBM as it continues to provide Business Partners with the tools and capabilities needed to help clients solve complex IT challenges," said Tim Minnich, president of TransWorks. “TransWorks is excited to have Louisiana-Pacific as a new customer, and look forward to serving them for many years to come. We continually strive to deliver measurable value and highly reliable services to our customers.”
 
About IBM
 
For more information about IBM Advanced Business Partner, TransWorks, visithttp://www.trnswrks.com.

For more information about Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, visit http://www.lpcorp.com.

Press release:

Leading Egyptian Dairy and Juice Manufacturer and Distributor Increases Business Efficiencies Through IBM Integrated Solutions

Juhayna Food Industries Invests $ 1.15M to Build a Smarter IT Infrastructure

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Cairo, Egypt - 09 Aug 2012: Juhayna Food Industries is investing $ 1.15M into building a smarter computing infrastructure provided by IBM (NYSE: IBM). This move is designed to improve business flexibility and efficiency as the organization ramps up for growth in the years ahead.

As one of Egypt's largest dairy and fruit juice producers, Juhayna supports a distinguished list of clients through its 26 distribution centers in Egypt. The company's substantial growth plans require it to transform its business model to support current and future expansion plans.

 “Juhayna Food Industries group is keen to invest in technology to boost the company’s efficiency and performance,” said Seif El Din Thabet, Operations Director, Juhayna Food Industries.

The company first earmarked the use of technology to support growth in 2004, when it applied an SAP system to centrally manage critical business processes. Today, Juhayna is collaborating with IBM to build out the company's IT infrastructure to become agile and responsive to marketplace changes.

IBM is upgrading Juhayna’s IT infrastructure to support the SAP ERP and CRM applications that it uses for Finance, Personnel Management, Materials Management, Production Planning, Quality Management and Sales & Distribution.  The company will use IBM DB2 database software running on IBM Power Systems with the AIX operating system and IBM XIV Storage System in a fully virtualized environment using IBM PowerVM. The new IT infrastructure will enable Juhayna to enhance customer service and ensure business continuity with the more reliable computing platform.

“Juhayna Food Industries is effectively preparing for the future with an end-to-end development plan for its technology infrastructure,” said Amr Talaat, General Manager, IBM Egypt. “IBM is pleased to play a fundamental role in their transformation strategy with our products and field expertise.”

“Our new IBM-based platform will provide Juhayna the reliability and scalability needed to manage our business’s growth.” said Ihab Naguib, IT Associate Director. “In addition, IBM’s service has been exemplary – conducting a seamless migration of all our data within half the time we expected without any loss of information.”

The agreement was signed in late 2011 and implementation was completed this year. 

About Juhayna:

Juhayna Food Industries," is one of the leading Egyptian companies in the manufacturing, packaging & distributing milk, yoghurt, juices and fruit concentrates, it managed since its inception and to this day to enjoy the confidence of its consumers. Juhayna was founded in 1983 and presented a different concept in the food industry based on its sophisticated technology used in manufacturing, in an effort to provide an outstanding quality in the dairy and juice sectors. With a clear vision, continuous development and communication with customers, Juhayna was able to reach its consumers & gain their confidence and trust in her products. The company succeeded to create the most prevalent brand, Juhayna group is constantly working to achieve its goal which is "to provide leading food for all ages and a companion for all generations"

About IBM

For more information about IBM, please visit: www.ibm.com/gbs

News Release from BMC Software - Hospital Increases Efficiencies

BMC Software Enables Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital to Increase Operational Efficiencies by 50 percent

The BMC Control-M Workload Automation solution enables Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital to manage big data critical to patient security and hospital processes from a single point of control

TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 13, 2012 – Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital (VGHKS), the first and only public medical center in South Taiwan, is consolidating the management of its scheduled processing on all applications and platforms across the entire hospital with the BMC Control-M Workload Automation solution. This solution from BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC, the recognized leader in Business Service Management (BSM), has resulted in a 50 percent improvement in operational and manpower efficiencies.

 

BMC is successfully expanding its footprint in the medical service sector in Taiwan, and its relationship with VGHKS exemplifieshow medical centers and hospitals are deriving benefits from BMC solutions. These solutions help ensure efficient and safe execution of thousands of complex scheduled jobs every day as well as management of huge amounts of data connected by complex relationships in the ecosystem of medical services environments.

 

"After a rigorous evaluation process, we selected BMC Control-M as our new enterprise-level scheduling solution," said Shou Cheng Xiong, leader of Information Department at VGHKS. “By integrating and automating business processes and managing them from a single point of control, the platform provides a dynamic workload management solution that works across different systems and applications for the entire hospital now.”

 

Established in 1990, VGHKS has won public praise and recognition over the past two decades. However, its continuous growth, and the fact that it is the only public hospital in Southern Taiwan has also given rise to new challenges to the hospital’s IT system. Its IT team has had to manage an immensity of data and complexity of workflow processes that need access to statistics about the hospital, patients, daily revenues from all departments, changes in surgery priorities and duty shifts for more than 580 doctors and over 1,700 nurses and staff, and even specific details on particular diseases.

 

Facing increasing pressure to deliver faster and error-free IT performance, the VGHKS IT team’s most crucial problem was that its existing management system was unable to integrate with the mainframe host. This was because 80 to 90 percent of the hospital’s data is stored on the mainframe, while the applications run on the hospital’s open systems*. It could not seamlessly operate with those open systems on which all the applications were running. To solve the challenge, VGHKS sought a new automated solution from BMC, which minimized risk, eliminated delays between jobs, and integrated with the hospital’s existing IT infrastructure.

 

The BMC Control-M Workload Automation solution is now enabling the mainframe host of VGHKS to communicate with each of its open systems perfectly, integrating the management of critical scheduling processes from a single point of control, as well as eliminating errors in a simplified and automated manner. This in turn results in significant time saving by shortening the scheduled workload processing time by up to 50 percent.

 

Moreover, the BMC Control-M Workload Automation solution allows users to integrate their service level agreement (SLA) benchmarks to scheduled workloads in a single window from both business and technological perspectives. With the solution’s centralized GUI, the easy-to-use and intuitive interface does not require knowledge on mainframe or Time Sharing Option (TSO) mastery. As a result, manpower efficiency has improved by 50 percent and training time and costs related to IT staff have been reduced.

 

“In the medical industry, a huge amount of patient data and diagnostic statistics are transmitted every single day. This information is needed by processes that must be carried out at any time, making a robust and easy-to-manage IT infrastructure extraordinarily important,” said John Cheng, regional director of Mainframe Service Management, BMC Greater China. “BMC Control-M secures and executes data across mainframe and distributed environments, automates job scheduling and ensures security and stability while lowering cost. For VGHKS the benefits are clear: greater efficiency and productivity, reduced risk and a better quality experience for staff and patients alike.”

 

The implementation of the BMC Control-M Workload Automation solution only took six months to go live across the entire enterprise of VGHKS and it is performing flawlessly in a hybrid environment now. By unifying system operations and management across different systems and applications, the solution has helped VGHKS see the potential of further optimizing its IT system in the future, allowing IT to dynamically manage workloads to match ever-changing business priorities. This ensures that business needs are met – regardless of how complex or unpredictable they may be.

 

Read the full case study here.