CEVA smooths merger with Eagle Logistics with Compuware Changepoint
Feb 03, 2009
CEVA, one of the world's largest transport and logistics companies, has more than 50,000 employees in over a hundred countries.
CEVA was in the process of being divested by TNT and sold to the private equity firm Apollo Management. After this, CEVA was sold to and merged with Eagle Global Logistics. That involved migrating CEVA's network, storage, applications and the ERP and related supply chain systems, to a new environment, while ensuring business continued uninterrupted. CEVA needed a change and project management suite to help its IT teams manage the migration.
However, the organisation already experienced weekly upheavals to its IT infrastructure. Every time CEVA took on a new client, the company had to integrate its own logistics systems with the client's scheduling and supply chain systems. IT teams made significant changes to the organisation's IT architecture on a weekly basis. "It was an extremely challenging situation for us," said Fergus Hoedeman, CEVA's global IT director of Contract Logistics. "We had complex migration procedures going on during the integration with Eagle, and at the same time we were taking on new lients and integrating our systems with theirs every week. When we integrated our systems with those of our clients, we needed to adapt to new infrastructure and system implementations for warehouse management systems. We were well aware there was a great deal of interdependency between our systems, our clients' systems and Eagle's systems, and we wanted to avoid any problems arising from altering one variable within a very carefully balanced IT ecosystem.
"Fundamentally, our services have to continue as normal. Because of the enormous growth of the company, there must be no "freeze." At the same time, we do not have an unlimited supply of people and resources. So the question for us was: How do we best address demand and supply, whilst ensuring that new client implementations always have priority?" said Hoedeman.
CEVA also wanted to be able to review its overall ICT operation. Because its ITC had been established from a number of other acquisitions, CEVA tended to operate in a relatively segmented fashion.
Solution
Since CEVA had already been using Compuware Changepoint for some time, it decided to expand its use of the solution to help manage the change processes during the merger. Changepoint helped the team track all ongoing projects, new client implementations and the merger of IT systems with Eagle.
CEVA also took the opportunity to use Changepoint to rationalise its ICT operations and processes.
Results
With Changepoint, CEVA now gain greater visibility into all of its IT projects from one central dashboard. This helps the company's executive management:
* monitor all crucial IT projects
* oversee the integration of IT systems with new clients
* track the progress of merging IT systems with Eagle
* ensure projects do not conflict with one another.
Changepoint gives CEVA management teams the visibility they need to manage the interdependencies between projects, as well as the changes that arise from them. Because CEVA can see that business-critical IT systems are left uninterrupted, IT management can assure their business counterparts and clients that business will run as usual--even during mergers and acquisitions.
In addition, CEVA relies on Changepoint to define workflows for implementing changes and projects during the merger process. This ensures there are no conflicts or constraints between projects, for
example, that planned maintenance does not conflict with the integration of a new client's ERP application.If certain events occur now, a built-in alarm alerts the relevant project leader to take action.
Changepoint also helps CEVA standardise how IT projects operate across the entire company.
"We now have a situation where we use one solution for both change management and portfolio management. This makes exchanging information much easier, and it's now much simpler to keep an overview of all the changes and their effects on the projects in progress," concluded Hoedeman. "With Changepoint, we can also manage the IT that underpins key business processes and ensure that any changes we make during the merger do not affect our customers."
