TNT Express Uses OPNET ACE to manage applications performance
Background
TNT Express is the world's leading business to business express
delivery company. The company delivers 3.3 million parcels, documents
and pieces of freight a week to over 200 countries using its
network of nearly 900 depots, hubs and sortation centres. TNT
Express operates over 18,000 road vehicles and 42 aircraft and
has the biggest door-to-door air and road express delivery infrastructure
in Europe.
TNT Express employs 43,000 staff worldwide and is the first ever
organisation to achieve global recognition as an Investor in
People. The company reported sales in 2004 of 4.7 billion euros.
Profits of 373 million euros earned by TNT Express during 2004
were higher by 35% than the same period in 2003 (276 million
euros).
TNT Express is a division of TNT N.V., the global provider of
express, mail and logistics services which also operates TNT
Logistics and Royal TPG Post.
Objectives:
The TNT network has a growing number of applications, including traditional mainframe access, Web enablement of new applications, Intranet, Data Warehousing, CRM, SAP, e-mail, etc. Although these applications may perform well in development environments, they frequently under-perform and sometimes fail when deployed into production networks. As a result, users get frustrated, application developers point fingers at the network, and network managers suspect faulty application design.
When faced with under-performing applications and scarce intelligence about networked application behaviour, TNT was forced to pursue trial and error approaches to improve performance, which was time-consuming and expensive to carry out. Support staff spent many hours/days analysing complex data, so that network upgrades are implemented.
“One of our biggest challenges is to ensure smooth operation of all our mission-critical applications, and to set the users’ expectations as TNT migrates away from traditional green screen applications to client/server and Web based applications.”
TNT’s vision includes:
- Profiling new applications before they are deployed on the network, in order to assess the impact of the infrastructure on transaction response times
- Easily and more accurately predict the impact of new applications/services on existing critical applications
- Make accurate recommendations for hardware upgrades to provide and/or sustain application response times
Solution:
After examining the marketplace, TNT decided to implement OPNET ACE to assist in managing application performance. ACE allows TNT to quickly identify application performance bottlenecks and their root causes, and then to predict the impact of different fix options.
TNT Express is also taking innovative steps to improve performance expectations among users, through better simulation-based expectations, using ACE’s simulation features. This reduces the overall number of tickets.
“Networked applications are crucial to our core business. We find ACE’s capabilities to be very important for maintaining smooth operations of our mission-critical applications. Before tools like ACE came along, it was extremely difficult to find these many performance problems. Now we can isolate the root causes almost immediately after hearing complaints, or in many cases, before the problems even occur. “
Julia Elliott, Network Project Manager