Foodvest
, a £1.1bn seafood manufacturing firm, is consolidating its IT
systems and applications architecture to provide a unified view of
the company and deliver more reliable IT services.
Foodvest, which was bought by private equity firm Lion Capital
in June last year, owns Young's and The Seafood Company in the UK,
and Findus in Scandinavia and France. It has around 6,300 staff -
4,000 in the UK - in more than 20 factories.
Alan Dodes, IT director for the group, said, "The business
strategy is for a united Foodvest, and the
IT consolidation strategy is designed to facilitate this.
Service improvement is also key, and gets equal focus."
The initial projects include a review of Foodvest's wide area
network, an upgrade, which includes consolidation of suppliers, and
consolidation of the datacentre operations. Dodes said applications
such as e-mail were also being consolidated.
"The initial drive is focused mainly on back office systems. We
will also reduce the number of variants of application hosted at
individual sites in due course," he said.
A key part of the
datacentre consolidation is to automate job scheduling.
Foodvest has chosen
UC4's real-time workload
automation suite for the task based on experience using it at
Findus.
"Simple sequential job scheduling could not deliver the advanced
control of processing that we require," said Dodes. "We want
applications and their dependencies to run automatically and to
tell us immediately when things go wrong."
Photo: OJO Images/Rex Features