Challenges: Fast global application performance is needed to meet 20-minute SLAs
KLX is the company airlines call when they’ve got a plane full of people sitting on the tarmac, unable to take off until a replacement part arrives. With 110 global facilities (including 55 forward stock warehouses) and nearly 4,000 employees, KLX can deliver a replacement part in as little as 20 minutes.
“We have very short service level agreements (SLAs), anywhere from four hours to 20 minutes,” explains Jack Ortman, Managing Director, Infrastructure at KLX. “We have a whole program called AOG (aircraft on the ground) to respond as quickly as possible when an aircraft that should be flying is grounded because of parts.”
Properly managing an inventory of 800,000 distinct SKUs is critical to meeting the short SLAs. “It's a question of having the inventory, number one, and then also properly managing it so parts are near where they’re going to be used,” says Ortman. KLX uses the Kardex logistics system for this. Kardex is so important to KLX that Ortman calls it “the lifeblood of our business.”
Kardex is centralized in a US database and accessed over the WAN. Ortman worked with Riverbed partner, Tier3 Technologies, to create—from scratch—a global IT infrastructure that ensures good application performance over a WAN, even at KLX offices in remote areas of Australia, China and South Africa.
“When we were spun off from B/E Aerospace, we had a unique opportunity, a green-field environment where we could select the best technologies,” Ortman says. “Given the long distances and latencies we deal with, we knew one of those technologies would be WAN optimization. And not just for Kardex. We have a number of key business systems that are delivered over a network and whose performance is critical, including some of our financial systems, email, and Office 365.”
Ensuring data security was another consideration of Ortman’s as he set up the new infrastructure. “Some of our customers are in the defense industry, and there are specific compliance requirements we must meet. And some of our offices are in areas that are risky for one reason or other. We take data security and protection very seriously,” he notes.
Finally, Ortman had to keep an eye on costs. “Certainly as we separated from our former parent company, we wanted to make sure our costs to operate the environment ourselves were going to be less than what we were paying them to do it before,” he adds.
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