Mondi has Network Performance Management in the Bag

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CUSTOMER NAME: Mondi
INDUSTRY: International Packaging and Paper Company
LOCATIONS: 102 Locations in 30 Countries
EMPLOYEES: 25,000

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

• Connecting 102 distributed offices in 30 countries
• Lack of full visibility into end user issues before they affected productivity
• Existing IT infrastructure investments

SOLUTION

• SD_WAN visibility and assurance using LiveNX and Cisco IWAN

BUSINESS RESULTS

• Better online experiences through continuous insight, service assurance, and control of enterprise networks
• Increased employee productivity and customer satisfaction
• Enhanced ability to visualize the network at its deepest levels, pinpoint and proactively address issues, and offer playback

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

As an international packaging and paper group with 102 locations across 30 countries and $8 billion in annual revenue, Mondi’s products touch millions of lives every single day. Having steadily grown through a combination of strong corporate leadership, product innovation in core markets, and strategic mergers and acquisitions, Mondi now has more than 25,000 employees.

To better serve its customers and prepare for future growth, the company undertook a major initiative to transform its global IT network. To do this, they turned to LiveAction and Dimension Data, a global leader in IT services and LiveAction partner.

Dimension Data implemented LiveNX to increase employee and manufacturing productivity, accelerate the integration of global networks resulting from mergers and acquisitions, and reduce costs.

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Mondi makes sustainable products consisting of natural fibers and produced with renewable resources. Some of these products include bags, boxes, and pouches that are found in millions of households and businesses across a variety of industries including consumer packaged goods, construction, agriculture, food and beverages, and medical and pharmaceutical. For example, Mondi’s packaging products are used for items such as cereal and flour, e-retail packaging and hazardous goods, and to protect medical devices and pharmaceutical products.

From an internal perspective, Mondi is fully integrated across the packaging and paper value chain – from managing forests and producing pulp, paper, and compound plastics to developing industrial and consumer packaging solutions.

“As a global company and industry leader, we require a exible and powerful IT network that supports our continued growth and easily integrates the IT networks of acquired companies to ensure business always runs smoothly. This is why we rely on the expertise of Dimension Data for managed services and LiveAction’s LiveNX platform to provide deep insights into our network, troubleshoot issues, and deliver a next generation SD-WAN”

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

With employees and operations working around the world, Mondi needs a flexible and powerful IT network to maintain its strong market presence and continued growth.

Dimension Data and LiveAction ensure the customers’ employees can fully optimize the tools, devices, and applications on the network to connect and collaborate.

Mondi wanted assurance that the network transformation would:

• Easily integrate newly acquired companies within the existing IT network
• Increase employee productivity through delivery of better online experiences
• Boost manufacturing productivity through improved network performance
• Reduce costs associated with network management and troubleshooting
• Capitalize on the latest advances in SD-WAN technology and prior investments

The initial scope of the LiveAction project was to manage and monitor the network that supports 4,000 employees at the company’s largest site – the corporate office in Vienna, Austria.

Before using LiveNX, the company couldn’t easily see slow utilization or potential network issues before they affected the user’s experience. What happened most often is that an employee notified network engineers when applications were slow to respond.

All that changed quickly once LiveNX was fully up and running. Now, with fast monitoring occurring every 30 seconds, network engineers are immediately notified of performance issues including slowdowns in application response times. According to the customer, LiveNX is “far better at noticing issues than other network performance management products.”

As part of the LiveNX platform’s advanced analytics capabilities, network engineers can easily drill down to find out the reasons behind an issue or get recommendations on next best steps to address and resolve problems before they impede productivity. Further enhancing its meantime-to-repair (MTTR) capabilities, LiveNX’s DVR-like playback capabilities allow the customer to go back at any point in time to identify the point of failure.

SOLUTION

LiveAction simplifies Mondi’s network by delivering better online experiences through continuous insight, service assurance, and control of enterprise networks. The customer uses LiveNX to:

• Monitor more than 400 devices
• Provide situational awareness, semantic-based analysis, and modeling
• Present a visual deeper understanding of the network to accelerate productivity and boost customer satisfaction
• Support a global network and accelerate the integration of newly acquied divisions and companies
• Pinpoint and proactively address issues and offer playback, which is critical to troubleshooting and adherence to SLAs

Additionally, LiveNX is a recommended management platform for Mondi’s existing Cisco’s intelligent wide area network (IWAN), which includes a comprehensive set of traffic control and security features within its routers. LiveNX also uses Cisco TrustSec to segment the network, protect critical trust assets, and enforce tiered access to information.

According to one of Mondi’s managers of communication networks, “As a global company and industry leader, we require a flexible and powerful IT network that supports our continued growth and easily integrates the IT networks of acquired companies to ensure business always runs smoothly. This is why we rely on the expertise of Dimension Data for managed services and LiveAction’s LiveNX platform to provide deep insights into our network, troubleshoot issues, and deliver a next generation SD-WAN.”

Mondi and Dimension Data leverage LiveNX’s custom reports, which include big picture device topology as well as the ability to zoom in on individual devices for deeper insights and analytics. This insight and assurance has led the customer to expand its use of LiveNX throughout the company. Based on the success of the initial project, the customer is methodically deploying LiveNX across additional lines of business.

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