Car components giant cuts new IT costs by 20%

Calsonic Kansei (formerly Calsonic International), which manufactures engine cooling, climate control systems and exhausts for Nissan, Ford, Honda, Peugeot and BMW, says it’s cut IT infrastructure costs by 20% while simultaneously improving resilience, support and future-proofing, and massively expanding its business. The firm, which uses Northgate Information Solutions as its IT supplier, had a five year old system comprising dual servers, with clustering options and hardware resilience. But since installation, the business had changed and developed from essentially a single site to a European group with multiple sites all needing IT support, redundancy and the rest. Ceri Small, chief information officer at CK Europe, says the company wanted to centralise IT across the whole European business, move to offer full 24x7 pan-European service, support improved management information and provide robust, high spec support for its Glovia ERP application, now being rolled out. But he says, “We also wanted to reduce the total cost of ownership of our whole business IT infrastructure.” In the event Northgate has provided a Veritas Sun cluster system and, with the reducing costs of hardware and sophistication of modern infrastructure resilience systems, came in at 20% below the earlier costs – while also improving its service offering to proactive maintenance. So far, as part of the £1.8 million deal, the infrastructure, now centralised on Llanelli in Wales (one of the company’s four manufacturing sites in the UK), covers five of the firm’s eight sites across Europe. In addition Northgate provides proactive remote support from its data centre in Hemel Hempstead whilst local round-the-clock technical support is provided by Northgate’s Bristol office. Small says he’s confident it can be expanded to the rest as the need arises without additional significant outlay. He adds: “More often than not these levels of savings are made through tough contract negotiations or by simply reducing IT spend. At CK Europe we knew that investment in the right infrastructure and more efficient use of IT would reap rewards. “We now have the latest operating system, upgraded software, a disaster recovery programme and remote management of IT systems. Northgate is continuously improving our technology base and helping us to maintain required levels of service and reliability which enables us to reduce our total cost of ownership.” Meanwhile, the Glovia ERP system, which CK Europe bought in 1998, is now in Washington and Shildon county Durham, where the firm serves Nissan, and is now ready for roll out across the rest of Europe. CK also supports five different CAD systems for its automotive customers, and is now starting to implement a new MatrixOne PLM (product lifecycle management) system for engineering development across Europe – although these are on a separate system infrastructure for the time being.