MSD in South Africa is a subsidiary of the global, research-based pharmaceutical company Merck & Co, in the USA.
MSD discovers, develops, manufactures and markets vaccines and medicines to address unmet medical needs. At the company`s South African operations in Midrand, Johannesburg, five buildings - including the marketing/sales department, finance/ICT, a training arm with an auditorium, the factory and a warehouse - needed to be interconnected. As a result of this requirement, existing equipment had to be upgraded.
MSD required a complete overhaul of its network. Its infrastructure was not meeting current requirements, as the cabling was outdated (almost 10-years-old) and was becoming increasingly unreliable, with certain segments experiencing regular downtime.
This became problematic for the company and, coupled with the international requirement to standardise equipment, propelled the company to upgrade its network, including the cabling.
"The old network infrastructure impacted our operations in all areas as access to information was slow and unreliable. In today`s competitive environment, it is important to ensure the ICT infrastructure supports the operation, ensuring production is not hindered and all associated areas of the business function smoothly. Our network included of a mixture of vendor products, making it difficult for our international ICT team to provide us with support. Our international office manages our network and monitors the bandwidth remotely, further driving the requirement for the upgrade," says Arnold Botha, IT Operations Manager at MSD.
MSD plans to migrate to a voice over IP (VOIP) platform in the near future, which further necessitated the upgrade of its network.
Specifications were sent to selected resellers and system integrators, allowing them to bid for the business.
KSS, a converged network integrator focusing on integrated data, voice and/or video solutions, won the bid. It provided MSD with the specified product, assisted with the implementation and upgraded the network to meet international standards, providing MSD with a more robust architecture. Botha adds: "We had previously worked with KSS and know their high service levels and excellent capabilities with regards to networking. They also provided us with the best pricing, making them the natural choice."
KSS was commissioned to install 23 Nortel switches and Lancast (Metrobility) fibre modules, Cisco fibre modules and Nortel fibre models. In addition, KSS had to replace the older CAT 5 cabling that catered for a 100 megabit network with cabling that caters for Gigabit speeds.
"The implementation was handled in phases with each building configured individually. Network implementations need to be handled quickly and efficiency and this was achieved through pre-configuring and testing of the solution at our testing centre in Midrand, prior to implementation. This allowed us to minimise implementation time significantly," says Corne Sassenberg, Senior Account Manager at KSS.
Notes Botha: "The implementation was, however, not entirely without challenges. We had an unannounced visit from our overseas auditors, forcing us to delay our implementation plans until they had completed the audit. In addition, due to the specifications of standards changing at an overseas level, firmware on some of the products had to be upgraded.
"On the whole, however, we were very impressed with KSS`s service and its level of professionalism. The company is based close by to our offices and its staff is available to us within 10 to 15 minutes if we require assistance with maintenance and support issues."
MSD has benefited significantly from the upgrade and the network now supports its business-critical information and systems, ensuring production runs smoothly and is optimised.
Says Botha: "We have also seen a difference with our backup procedures. Our overnight backups lessen the load on the network during working hours and now take six hours rather than 10. In addition, our support staff now only requires one set of skills, since they no longer have to support a multitude of technologies and brands. The upgrade of our network was successful and we are fully realising the benefits in terms of greater productivity and efficiency."
Share