Glanbia renews HP outsourcing contract

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Pictured: HP’s Brian Hurley

HP has renewed for five years its outsourcing contract with Glanbia, the Kilkenny-based dairy and food firm. HP Outsourced Services supplies and supports the SAP system on which Glanbia’s worldwide operation depends. The new deal will see the contract expanded to include monitoring an extra 200 in-house servers.

Glanbia’s global movement of perishable goods is essentially reliant on a data management system, and pivotal to this are its SAP business applications. If they went down, deliveries would grind to a halt in two or three hours. Glanbia’s consumer foods division alone makes 35,000 deliveries a week, and its Service Level Agreement with HP calls for 99.5% availability each quarter – a level of reliability that HP has exceeded for the last two years.

Brian Hurley, head of HP Managed Services, said: “We and Glanbia have worked hard to bring this project to where it is today.”

To protect availability, Glanbia’s data is constantly replicated on-line to a second HP data centre in Dublin, while 24×7 monitoring and a separate disaster recovery plan provide additional protection.

A single centralised data centre offers significant advantages, as Glanbia Technology services manager Fergal Wall explains: “No matter where you are, from Dublin to Shanghai, as an employee of Glanbia you will be accessing our single instance of SAP in HP’s Dublin data centre.”

The system has helped Glanbia achieve significant customer service improvements, which are benchmarked before and after. “For example, the system helps us to get the right product to the right place at the right time” says Wall. “If stock is missing at a customer site, the system finds out what the problem and helps us fix it.”

The success of the partnership highlights the benefits achievable through a well designed outsourcing relationship. Wall noted: “By combining outsourced managed technical services with internal business understanding, the combination of the two can deliver real added value.”

Read More: Deals done