UNITED CAPS is a global industry reference for the design and production of high-performance plastic caps and closures.
BENEFITS
- 40% reduction on time spent on maintenance operations
- 20% increase in infrastructure availability with Nutanix FILES
- Less time spent on maintenance resulting in 80% savings in time to run new projects.
CHALLENGE
UNITED CAPS is a major player in the international packaging industry. The company designs and produces innovative, high-performance plastic caps and closures. Its broad portfolio of advanced standard and bespoke solutions makes UNITED CAPS a preferred partner for the world’s leading companies in several sectors (food and non-food). In the first category they deliver solutions for beverages, dairy products, oils, dressings, baby food, bread spreads (such as jam), processed foods (canned chips, sugar, ...) and pharmaceuticals. For the non-food industry UNITED CAPS is a supplier for agro chemicals, automotive liquids, cleaning products and cosmetics.
“We support our customers’ value chain by safeguarding product integrity, assuring safety and consumer health, and ultimately protecting brand reputation”, says Michael Renard, IT Infrastructure and Security Manager for the UNITED CAPS Group.
As with every modern organization, IT is a crucial element. “Changing demands, new technology, integration in a larger overall supply chain. We have the same challenges as large multinationals but as a smaller company we don’t have the same resources. Hence, collaboration is very important. Collaboration, manufacturing and supply chain, all of these core activities are based on our IT solutions”, explains Michael Renard. A few years ago, UNITED CAPS started to centralize its IT and to automate its industrial processes. But the old solution was no longer scalable and raised more and more problems, such as data replication and lack of storage, ultimately this resulted in lower performance.
SOLUTION
UNITED CAPS looked at cloud computing as a new solution, to enable elastic and flexible workloads. However, cost control also remained crucial for UNITED CAPS: they wanted a predictive workload without any hidden costs. In addition, UNITED CAPS was also looking for an ecosystem that enabled them to welcome new projects without having to systematically seek other solutions and thus increase costs. Michael Renard: “Our demands in short were to have a reliable, secure and modern system with controlled costs.”
After contacting several vendors UNITED CAPS chose Nutanix. Michael Renard: “When I first contacted Nutanix, I was not looking for a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), but I was looking for a technological change for the next decade. This change was needed to support our smooth transition from a legacy platform to a modern platform allowing us to jointly operate old and modern technologies.”
Nutanix installed a Proof of Concept (PoC) to provide an overview of the technical performance and the accessibility of the Nutanix support team. As a result of this PoC, we rolled out the Nutanix platform, from the main IT infrastructure to the data centers of all the production plants, creating the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
The Nutanix solution consists of several building blocks: Acropolis, AHV (First), PRISM Pro and FILES. The HCI based on KVM helped UNITED CAPS to leave the Hyper-V and SAN legacy model, while the PRISM Central is now a key component in the day-to-day management of the ecosystem.
CHOOSING NUTANIX
One of the main reasons UNITED CAPS chose Nutanix, was due to their vision. “We found the ‘DNA of hyperconverged’ in the Nutanix solution. The team have really gone above and beyond to understand our needs. Their proposals and answers were fast and clever”, says Michael Renard. “In fact, when the PoC started in Luxembourg, everything seemed so simple. We were waiting for the moment when it would become (too) complex. But this moment never came.”
The collaboration was very smooth. After few days several system administrators asked the IT manager to turn production VMs on this new infrastructure as it was so performant and so easy to manage. According to the IT manager the added value of Nutanix is the support and performance of the technology.
RESULTS
Today the whole infrastructure of UNITED CAPS is built on Nutanix. Michael Renard: “We have drastically improved our stability and our performance. As a result, we have greater agility in requests and our implementations are much faster. In additional to better performance, we have also reviewed and optimized our disaster recovery.”
The modern technology drastically improved the stability KPI’s of UNITED CAPS, providing increased availability of their solutions for all their employees, regardless of whether they are working in the office, in productions areas or in their home office.
Looking at the Return on Investment, UNITED CAPS was able to eliminate IT integrators and reduce the time spent on maintenance operations by 40%. “The availability of the entire IT infrastructure has increased by 20% and the usage of products like FILES optimized operations, availability, and security. As a result, we don’t need to use expensive SAN anymore. Our workforce spends 50% less effort on IT activities now and even 80% less time when duplicating productions environments for projects or tests. In short we save money because of the simplicity”, explains Michael Renard. Plants are more available than ever and easier to manage. Backup has been simplified and it has become more efficient.
THE FUTURE
Dealing with the explosion of IoT will be the next challenge. Therefore, UNITED CAPS is working on a transformation of the entire infrastructure. “The goal is to be able to rebuild the information system via coding and to deploy new plants by only coding the deployment. IoT will be one of our biggest challenges as it is growing so fast. Improving our security is also a challenge. For these reasons we are looking at products like Flow, Karbon and XIoT”, concludes Michael Renard.