Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire Keeps Business On Track with Heroix eQ

In times when many companies are experiencing sluggish profits, Bridgestone, one the world's largest manufacturers of tires and other rubber products, is managing to keep its business on track, with help from Heroix eQ Management Suite. In fact, Bridgestone Corporation, the parent company of Bridgestone America Holdings (BSAH), reported 2002 annual group net sales of US$18.7 billion - a 5% increase from the previous year.

At the Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire LLC plant in Oklahoma City - one of 40 Bridgestone production facilities worldwide - tires for passenger vehicles and light trucks are produced 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To keep this 64-acre facility - comprised of one and half million square feet of warehouse space, one million square feet of manufacturing, and 2,000 employees - operating at peak performance, the IT team takes every measure to ensure IT applications, systems, and networks are performing efficiently at all times.

A disk crash, a computer dropped off the network, print servers off-line, a malfunctioning robot, inaccessible applications, and overloaded disk drives are just a few of the problems that can significantly impact this facility's ability to reach its typical daily production target of 34,000 tires. To make certain these problems are not encountered - and to ensure business goals are met - Bridgestone relies upon the Heroix eQ Management Suite, a multiplatform monitoring and management product.

Business-Focused IT Management Made Practical

Using Heroix eQ, Bridgestone Firestone is not only able to monitor and manage a wide range of IT resources and business processes, it is also able to quickly and easily associate the performance of various resources (applications, databases, servers, networks, and infrastructure) with the specific business activities they support.

In fact, the IT team can easily view and manage the performance of their NT Advanced Servers, UNIX Servers, Windows 2000 Servers, SQL 7, SQL 2000, Exchange, core business applications, networks, disk I/O and other IT resources via a single console. Whenever a performance threshold is exceeded, an automated alert is sent to the proper individuals. At any given time, the IT team can see exactly what performance issues exist and what steps are being taken to fix them.

Now, instead of being reactive to problems that end users complain about, the IT team is made aware of problems before they impact their user community - and their manufacturing output.

Intelligent Monitoring Has Never Been Easier

With Solution Studio, Heroix eQ's versatile graphical user interface (GUI), Bridgestone is able to extend and customize the monitoring and management of its various applications and underlying infrastructure -- without writing a single line of code.

In fact, Heroix eQ even monitors and manages the performance of the robot in the warehouse. This is just one example of how Heroix eQ's flexibility and extensibility allow Bridgestone/Firestone to monitor resources unique to their business.

Bridgestone/Firestone also uses Heroix eQ's Web Management Console - making Heroix eQ's management features accessible from any platform.
And, using Heroix eQ's new Web reporting portal, consolidated reports and graphs from multiple monitored resources are available 24 hours a day - making it effortless for business users and IT staff to view performance information as frequently as necessary. These reports serve as an excellent communication vehicle for those that need to know what performance problems exist and what corrective actions are being taken.

In addition to these overall system reports, Bridgestone/Firestone has configured Heroix eQ to provide online Exchange utilization reports to appropriate management team members - making it possible to assess each users' mail capacity requirements and allowing for better capacity planning.

Heroix eQ Means More Productivity, Less Downtime, and Better Days
"Having the ability to proactively monitor simple things like disk storage, CPU utilization and database performance can mean the difference between spending hours trying to find and correct a problem, and spending a minute to make a simple tweak that will allow me to avoid problems," said David Gregg, Network Server Administrator at Bridgestone. By being able to proactively identify and correct issues before they become problems, Bridgestone/Firestone is able to avoid costly production downtime. According to Gregg, "using Heroix eQ means I have a lot less bad days. And, as an IT team, we are able to operate much more efficiently and our user community is better able to do their job."

From a cost savings standpoint, the Heroix eQ product has helped Bridgestone/Firestone save both time and money. By being able to identify and fix CPU utilization issues, disk I/O problems, storage capacity issues, systems that have gone off line, and memory thresholds that have been exceeded, Bridgestone/Firestone is able to keep production downtime at a minimum - and operational output on track.