It sometimes seems that running a successful business requires leaders to predict the future. How much inventory is needed for summer? Do we buy an existing solution or build one in house? What kind of products will customers need a year from now? What technology will we need a year from now? These and other questions require leaders to adopt a forward-thinking mentality for the best chance of continued success.
Focusing on the culture also makes it easier to create the kind of product and service innovations necessary to keep clients excited and engaged. Whether you dominate a particular market or you’re a startup trying to make your way, you need ongoing new developments and technologies to beat competitors.
It’s not enough to simply have a future-forward management team. Your IT needs to operate the same way, which became our need when I first joined PiSA Farmacéutica in 2017.
Running Behind the Business
PiSA runs a large and complex organization that includes more than 1,500 pharmaceutical brands and 17 specialty lines. These products are created through 14 production plants located throughout Mexico. At nearly 80 years old, we are one of the most successful large corporations in the country, and we have around 22,000 employees across North America.
Since we have such a large operation and customer base, our manufacturing facilities must operate continuously. No matter the time of day or night, products continue to roll through our factories. From an IT perspective, that means any downtime is a nightmare, leading to delayed shipments and increased costs. In addition to that constant demand, our ongoing growth created an even larger headache.
PiSA was growing quickly, and our infrastructure was perpetually behind the business environment. Our 105-person IT staff spent a lot of time creating temporary fixes and updating systems as needed. Because we lagged behind the business, we couldn’t create as much value as we wanted.
Most IT offices can only dream of operating with a staff of more than a hundred. However, even with a team that large, it was increasingly difficult to keep up with the operational burden. Since we service the entire company, just monitoring ongoing server activity was an increasingly time-consuming activity. Solving problems and adjusting to the needs of separate business units regularly stretched staff to the limits.
I came to PiSA with many years of experience as an IT Director at different organizations. From the moment I arrived, it was understood that the IT department needed to become much more proactive. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. Because we support the entire business, any drastic changes would have to be well coordinated and guaranteed to work the first time.
Partners Make It Possible
HPE local partner organizations were largely responsible for helping us make the right decisions. We connected with HPE partner Computación Interactiva, causing all the pieces to fall into place.
Computación Interactiva also had a deep knowledge of HPE solutions. While we had some ideas about what we wanted, they helped us identify the servers and storage solutions that best suited our needs for flexibility and speed. Computación Interactiva was instrumental during the design and implementation phase, ensuring the integrations were set up correctly. With their assistance, we found an architecture that was easier to manage and much more powerful. And because they are a local company, it was much easier for them to get to know our systems and directly help with the migration and deployment. The speed of deployment was vital, and it had a positive impact throughout the organization.
Thanks to the skills, knowledge, and support from the teams at Computación Interactiva (especially Rodrigo Garcia, Account Manager; Chuy Guizar, Engineering Manager; and Julio Enrique Leon, General Commercial Manager), we completed the migration to our new infrastructure without disruption or downtime.
Getting Ahead of the Game
Since the implementation, we have experienced some of the anticipated positive results. One of these is having greater operational control, and we can attribute that to HPE OneView.
As an infrastructure management tool, HPE OneView makes it possible to control the entire system from a single console. With thousands of employees located in more than a dozen sites, the ability to monitor everything from a centralized location gives us greater visibility and reduces the burden on IT’s shoulders. It’s now much simpler to solve problems and analyze the flow of resources because we only have to check one place.
HPE Superdome and HPE Primera guarantee us hardware with higher availability than we had previously, boosting our key performance indicators for infrastructure availability. And even though we didn’t change anything regarding our software availability, we have seen a tremendous increase with additional components from HPE Superdome.
