Manitou Group Customer Success Story

Using Essential to Successfully Manage a Complex IT Landscape to Enhance Decision Making And Improve IT Support for the Business

Manitougroup Logo Transp

Industry

Manufacturing

Headquarters

France

Highlights

  • Significantly transformed our enterprise architecture management
  • Addresses data decentralization and standardization
  • Enhanced our IT support capabilities and decision-making processes
  • Improved the overall quality of our data

The positive outcomes underscore Essential’s role as a critical enabler in streamlining IT operations and aligning them with business goals effectively

Conclusion

Our journey with Essential, from the open-source version to the cloud platform, has significantly transformed our enterprise architecture management. By addressing our initial challenges of data decentralization and standardization, Essential Cloud has not only enhanced our IT support capabilities and decision-making processes but also improved the overall quality of our data. Moving forward, there are still many aspects of Essential we look forward to exploring further, including further rationalization efforts, fully utilising the business layer, and particularly leveraging the new BPMN editor to streamline our business process management.

The Challenge

Organisational Context:

Our organisation faced several challenges in managing its complex IT landscape, including:

  1. Proliferation of application lists and diagrams:
    For the application and technology aspects, we had a proliferation of spreadsheets and diagrams that were non-centralized and often outdated. Determining which application was installed on which server or understanding which data flow served which application required consulting multiple documents, slowing down diagnostics, decision-making, and change management. This was particularly problematic given our scale, with nearly 500 applications, 650 application flows, 41 facilities, and approximately 800 servers.
  2. Business Issues:
    On the business side, the situation was similar, with non-standardized BPMN diagrams and scattered Google Sites presenting various business domains. This lack of standardization and centralization made it difficult to understand and manage business processes effectively. Additionally, there was a significant problem of visibility into which applications supported specific business processes and who the users were, complicating impact analysis and strategic alignment.

The Solution

Journey from Open Source to Cloud Version:

  1. Initial Adoption of Open Source Essential:
    1. Objective: Evaluate the capabilities of the Essential tool for enterprise architecture management.
    2. Actions: Deployed the open-source version to map out the current IT landscape, focusing on applications and their dependencies (flows and servers mainly).
    3. Limitations: The open-source version lacked editors to facilitate efficient data capture and entry, which made it challenging to maintain accurate and up-to-date information.
  2. Transition to Essential Cloud:
    1. Migration: Seamlessly migrated data from the open-source version to the cloud platform. The cloud demo account provided by EAS helped us to better promote the tool to our direction committee.
    2. Workshops: Conducted workshops to define the required fields on each layer and data structures for our organisation’s needs.
    3. Configuration: Configured the editors ourselves to ensure better comprehension and facilitate data capture in the tool, tailored to our specific requirements.
    4. Integration: Integrated Essential Cloud with existing systems (vCenter, application flows repository, scheduler…) for data synchronisation.

The Outcome

Key Achievements:

  1. Enhanced IT Support:
    1. Mapping: Mapped IT applications to servers and to business to understand their criticality and impact.
    2. Outcome: Achieved a more precise view of our IT landscape, enabling our teams to better orient and analyse issues promptly.
  2. Improved Decision-Making:
    1. Reports: Utilised Essential Cloud’s views for data-driven insights.
    2. Outcome: Facilitated informed decision-making at all IT levels, accelerating initiatives, change impact analysis and knowledge sharing.
  3. Improved Data Quality:
    1. Quality of Information: Enhanced the quality of information captured through improved data entry processes and custom configured editors.
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