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Bridgestone Firestone North American
Tire Keeps Business On Track with Heroix eQ
 In times when many
companies are experiencing sluggish profits,
Bridgestone, one the world's largest manufacturers of
tires and other rubber products, is managing to keep its
business on track, with help from Heroix eQ Management
Suite. In fact, Bridgestone Corporation, the parent
company of Bridgestone America Holdings (BSAH), reported
2002 annual group net sales of US$18.7 billion - a 5%
increase from the previous year.
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At the
Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire LLC
plant in Oklahoma City - one of 40 Bridgestone
production facilities worldwide - tires for
passenger vehicles and light trucks are produced
24 hours |
| a day, 7 days a week.
To keep this 64-acre facility - comprised of one
and half million square feet of warehouse space,
one million square feet of manufacturing, and
2,000 employees - operating at peak performance,
the IT team takes every measure to ensure IT
applications, systems, and networks are performing
efficiently at all times. |
A disk crash, a computer dropped off the network,
print servers off-line, a malfunctioning robot,
inaccessible applications, and overloaded disk drives
are just a few of the problems that can significantly
impact this facility's ability to reach its typical
daily production target of 34,000 tires. To make certain
these problems are not encountered - and to ensure
business goals are met - Bridgestone relies upon the
Heroix eQ Management Suite, a multiplatform monitoring
and management product.
Business-Focused IT Management Made Practical
Using Heroix eQ, Bridgestone Firestone is not only able
to monitor and manage a wide range of IT resources and
business processes, it is also able to quickly and
easily associate the performance of various resources
(applications, databases, servers, networks, and
infrastructure) with the specific business activities
they support.
In fact, the IT team can easily view and manage the
performance of their NT Advanced Servers, UNIX Servers,
Windows 2000 Servers, SQL 7, SQL 2000, Exchange, core
business applications, networks, disk I/O and other IT
resources via a single console. Whenever a performance
threshold is exceeded, an automated alert is sent to the
proper individuals. At any given time, the IT team can
see exactly what performance issues exist and what
steps are being taken to fix them.
Now, instead of being reactive to problems that end
users complain about, the IT team is made aware of
problems before they impact their user community - and
their manufacturing output.
Intelligent Monitoring Has Never
Been Easier
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With Solution Studio, Heroix eQ's versatile
graphical user interface (GUI), Bridgestone is
able to extend and customize the monitoring and
management of its various applications and
underlying infrastructure -- without writing a
single line of code.
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In fact, Heroix eQ even monitors and manages
the performance of the robot in the warehouse.
This is just one example of how Heroix eQ's
flexibility and extensibility allow
Bridgestone/Firestone to monitor resources unique
to their business.
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Bridgestone/Firestone also uses Heroix eQ's Web
Management Console - making Heroix eQ's management
features accessible from any platform.
And, using Heroix eQ's new Web reporting portal,
consolidated reports and graphs from multiple monitored
resources are available 24 hours a day - making it
effortless for business users and IT staff to view
performance information as frequently as necessary.
These reports serve as an excellent communication
vehicle for those that need to know what performance
problems exist and what corrective actions are being
taken.
In addition to these overall system reports,
Bridgestone/Firestone has configured Heroix eQ to
provide online Exchange utilization reports to
appropriate management team members - making it possible
to assess each users' mail capacity requirements and
allowing for better capacity planning.
Heroix eQ Means More Productivity,
Less Downtime, and Better Days
"Having the ability to proactively monitor
simple things like disk storage, CPU utilization and
database performance can mean the difference between
spending hours trying to find and correct a problem, and
spending a minute to make a simple tweak that will allow
me to avoid problems," said David Gregg, Network
Server Administrator at Bridgestone. By being able to
proactively identify and correct issues before they
become problems, Bridgestone/Firestone is able to avoid
costly production downtime. According to Gregg,
"using Heroix eQ means I have a lot less bad days.
And, as an IT team, we are able to operate much more
efficiently and our user community is better able to do
their job."
From a cost savings standpoint, the Heroix eQ product
has helped Bridgestone/Firestone save both time and
money. By being able to identify and fix CPU utilization
issues, disk I/O problems, storage capacity issues,
systems that have gone off line, and memory thresholds
that have been exceeded, Bridgestone/Firestone is able
to keep production downtime at a minimum - and
operational output on track.
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