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Joan Saraco
Vice-President, Information Technology
SNC-Lavalin ProFac
SNC-Lavalin ProFac is Canada's largest outsource services provider. SNC-Lavalin, ProFac currently operates and manages the portfolio that encompasses more than 110 million square feet of real estate in over 9,000 facilities, more than 117 megawatts of power, approximately 50 naval vessels and hundreds of kilometers of highway.
In order to standardize our business processes bearing in mind that we still have customer uniquenesses that are important, we embarked on a project to genericize our business processes and standardize them on to one JD Edwards platform.
Martin Dewaele
Director, Business Systems Infrastructure
SNC-Lavalin ProFac
Our environment consisted of Intel based servers. Performance issues when they did arise were difficult to troubleshoot given the horizontal structure of the servers.
SARACO: From an administrative point of view, the environment was complex. Performance issues were starting to crop up and we were starting to feel as though we were hitting the upper limit of the platform.
If the CEO had posed to IT the question of what the impact of a hundred users would be to the system, it was going to be a difficult question to have to answer.
The System i platform promised to deliver the lowest total cost of ownership, as well as meet our scalability requirements and our performance requirements.
DEWAELE: With the assistance of our business partner Syntax and IBM, we installed two i5 servers -- one being a 570 and the other one being our disaster recovery 550.
The transition from the Intel based environment to the i5 environment has been extremely smooth. IBM has an enormous amount of documentation which has allowed us the ability to easily transition from an Intel environment to an i5 environment.
The environment is extremely easy to manage. We use IBM Director for all of our monitoring and it allows all of my team to know exactly what's going on in the system at any time. And now I only have one resource managing all of that environment versus a number of people managing the Intel environment.
SARACO: We went live on our first client on the iSeries Ontario Realty Corporation. It went very smooth, it went on schedule and the call center went up day one and by day three was driving statistics that were comparable to our existing call centers.
From an IT standpoint to be able to commit to senior management that our systems will serve us three or five years out; those are some of the most difficult questions.
I'm confident that JD Edwards running on the iSeries platform is going to serve SNC-Lavalin ProFac under its plans for growth with performance and with reliability and with responsiveness.