I joined the company in March 2019. I brought with me a clear vision of the future of IT and immediately began to put this vision into practice. Although I had the support of our management team, some members of my IT team were skeptical. You have to realize that we are used to playing the heroes in our industry. We know how to code apps and write scripts, we can reboot a wide area network after an outage, and we can easily restore a server or data center from backup. With these skills, we have often been the fire department in the past in tricky situations. Today, however, the major challenges in IT no longer lie in keeping the infrastructure running. Instead, our job is to create added value and help our clients and customers stay ahead of the competition.
Modern IT managers and decision-makers need to shift their focus away from the tools of the trade to the technologies and applications that drive innovation and increase profit margins: artificial intelligence (AI), business intelligence (BI) and automation.
These are the engines of the digital future. If you look under the hood, they differ from traditional IT tools in the same way that electric motors differ from combustion engines. For some, however, the changeover is very difficult. If you have spent years or decades solving IT problems, it can be difficult to embark on new career paths. Change is often not easy.
Adding Value Instead of Cutting Costs
When I started at Müller | Die lila Logistik, we had all our eggs in the traditional IT basket. We had an on-prem, hardware-based data center and a massive IT team that kept everything running smoothly. But we were stagnant instead of moving forward. I wanted to change that.
Rather than investing in physical infrastructure and assigning people to manage it, my goal was to virtualize our servers, move our data center to the cloud, and adopt software as a service (SaaS), storage as a service (STaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS).
I didn’t waste any time. Instead of phasing in this new approach slowly, we quickly moved everyone to Microsoft 365. We ditched our Microsoft Exchange servers and put email on the cloud, which gave us one less thing to manage. Next, we switched to a cloud-based warehouse management system. It was as simple as going to a supplier and saying, “We love your software, but we don’t want to configure or maintain it. Do you make a version for the cloud?”
"Cost-cutting measures are the worst way of saving money. Instead, focus on getting the best value for your investment."
A lot of companies make IT decisions based solely on cost-cutting measures, which is the worst way of saving money. I believe in getting the best value for your investment. Moving our infrastructure to the cloud didn’t reduce our IT spend, but it increased stability and freed my team to focus on providing creative solutions to our customers’ logistics issues.
Our next step was a big one. We moved from our aging MPLS network to SD-WAN. MPLS was an excellent technology for its time and was once the best solution for shaping and routing traffic. Today, SD-WAN offers the same traffic management features, runs on mixed networks, including the public internet, and is decoupled from hardware. You no longer have to rip apart your network to rebuild it. And you can configure all your hardware remotely. Better yet, you can hire an external partner to build and manage your network, and we did exactly that.
Building something new with a trusted partner
Although we were facing massive changes, we decided to continue working with the company that provided our MPLS infrastructure. RIEDEL Networks was founded in 2001 in Butzbach near Frankfurt. The company operates its own global MPLS network with nodes in over 40 countries and has recently started offering an SD-WAN solution. As a long-standing Cisco partner, RIEDEL was perfectly positioned to support our transition to a software-defined infrastructure.
A conventional MPLS infrastructure only offers limited bandwidth and restricted options. We therefore maintained two leased lines with low bandwidth to each of our customers' premises. These 1- or 2-megabit connections were not only slow, but also unreliable and difficult to maintain. If one line failed, our IT staff had to manually reroute the data traffic to the other line. We had minor outages every two to three weeks and massive network disruptions four to five times a year.
Fixing these problems required a lot of time and resources, which were then not available to develop better logistics solutions for our customers. When the contract for the MPLS leased lines expired, we asked RIEDEL for a better solution. At our first meeting, I emphasized that I didn't care about price, technology or provider. I wanted a fast, reliable network that had high availability and routed traffic to our customers' sites based on algorithms rather than manual intervention. It was also important to me that RIEDEL would take over the network management so that my team would be freed from the tasks of network maintenance.
At the second meeting, RIEDEL introduced me to the Cisco SD-WAN. We were excited about the solution and before we knew it, we were talking about service level agreements instead of technology details. Best of all, RIEDEL provided the new infrastructure for the same price as our old MPLS network and my people don't have to lift a finger to maintain it. We can see everything going on in the network via a management console, while RIEDEL does the work in the background.
Adopting new technology and changing our internal IT culture
We signed the contract in September 2019 and the new network went live in May 2020. Instead of the previous two lines with a high service level and low bandwidth to our customers' sites, we now have one such line for high-priority data and a second line with a low service level and high bandwidth for all other data flows. The SD-WAN automatically optimizes the data flow and routes it through the appropriate network segment, be it a private line or the public Internet, based on factors such as bandwidth requirements and costs. If a part of the network fails, algorithms redirect the data flow to functioning segments so that the data reliably reaches its destination.
Our SD-WAN is running perfectly and we have not had a single outage since switching from our MPLS. RIEDEL looks after our network infrastructure and our internet connection so that we can concentrate on providing our customers with the best possible support. The company has negotiated new agreements with our last mile providers on our behalf and helped us save on unnecessary telecom costs. We reinvest this saved money in managed services. So we are achieving much more with the same expenditure.
Adopting new #technology is easy. Changing an organization’s #IT culture is more of a challenge.
Introducing the new technology was easy. It was much more difficult to change the attitude and mindset of my people. Some wanted to stick to their old way of working and put out one fire after another. Others were afraid that automation would put them out of work. But when we started working with Microsoft 365, an understanding of the change slowly developed. Instead of looking after mail servers, they began to see themselves as business partners who could generate new business. They started to take on more interesting tasks and really utilize their skills. Our internal IT culture began to change.
For our customers, logistics is about moving data streams and managing supply chains. They very often choose their suppliers based on price - if they can save a few euros, they go to another provider. But if we can add value to our services and offer our customers more attractive SLAs than the competition for the same price, they will stay with us. With RIEDEL's Managed SD-WAN, Lila's IT team can focus on developing value-adding customer solutions instead of spending time on infrastructure support.
Pursuing revenue growth
Our current project with RIEDEL is about evaluating and implementing a cybersecurity solution for Müller | Die lila Logistik and our customers. As with our SD-WAN, we want a solution that does not tie up any of our resources. Although I am convinced that we need to secure our network and IT systems, I want to automate and outsource the necessary work so that my team can continue to focus on generating revenue. I have already proven that this strategy works - and we must now continue on this path.
Technology is a tool that can be used to increase business volume. Some people - and especially managers - are afraid of new technology.
new technology. They fear that new technology is too expensive or that it will disrupt a company's established processes. While this can sometimes be the case, technology can be steered in the right direction with a firm focus on results. A carpenter doesn't stop at making his own hammer.
hammer himself. He buys the best hammer on the market and builds a house with it. The same applies to IT experts: We need to create added value from our networks instead of just managing the infrastructure. This change has a big impact.
