Elbit Systems of America conquers the challenges of expansion with Enterprise IT Management.

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1 CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH Elbit Systems of America conquers the challenges of expansion with Enterprise IT.

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary SECTION 1: CHALLENGE 2 Efficiently delivering high-quality services to a rapidly growing organization Big company, small staff Acquisition headaches The cost of manufacturing downtime The need for asset control SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY 3 Meeting business challenges through unified IT management Improving service levels Making the most of a limited IT staff Reducing transition times at acquired companies Making better decisions at the factory Managing assets to manage costs Reducing the number of incidents SECTION 3: BENEFITS 7 Improving services while controlling costs SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS 8 ABOUT CA Back Cover Copyright 2009 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document As Is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages.

3 Executive Summary Challenge Elbit Systems of America (ESA) is a subsidiary of Elbit Systems Ltd., a publicly-held, global electronics company. With facilities throughout the U.S., the company manufactures and supports a wide range of technology-based systems for military and private sector use. ESA s revenues exceeded $500 million for the first time in An aggressive revenue goal of one billion dollars has been set for To reach that goal, the company is following a strategic plan of business line diversification and the acquisition of other companies. Both avenues have inherent challenges. Adding new products to the manufacturing mix will add to the complexity of plant technology systems. Acquisitions present a different set of problems, as acquired companies have to be brought in line with ESA procedures, quality standards, compliance levels and enterprise technologies. Opportunity ESA has put CA s Enterprise IT (EITM) vision into practice, with an integrated solution that includes CA NSM, CA Service Level and Catalog, CA CMDB, CA Service Desk, CA IT Client Manager, CA Asset Portfolio, CA Software Compliance Manager, CA ARCserve Backup and CA Anti-Virus for the Enterprise. By integrating the CA products through a Unified Service Model, ESA has a 360- degree view of its heterogeneous technology infrastructure and the services delivered through it. This approach has given the company s IT staff deep visibility into networks, applications and systems. The CA solutions have automated a number of tasks and workflows across ESA s geographically-dispersed business units. Benefits The integrated and automated approach of EITM has enabled ESA to: Improve service levels to end users Reduce system downtime in manufacturing facilities More quickly integrate acquisitions into the company Reduce costs through effective asset management Streamline and improve IT management Through EITM, the company has moved from largely outsourced IT management to a more cost-effective and responsive internal model. With the capabilities enabled by the CA solutions, ESA is continually improving IT-aligned processes, gaining efficiencies and becoming more productive. CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH 1

4 SECTION 1: CHALLENGE Efficiently delivering high-quality services to a rapidly growing organization In normal circumstances, company growth puts additional demands on an IT department. These can often be addressed methodically new equipment and systems are researched and purchased, new services are ramped up, and increases in the IT budget might allow for increased staff resources. Unfortunately for IT managers, circumstances are seldom truly normal. Growth can happen faster than expected, and the methodical approach has to be replaced by a strategic one if the IT staff is to keep up. Rapid growth demands a holistic approach to IT management and service delivery, based on efficiency and scalability and not on staff expansion and increased IT costs. New IT economics mandate that IT must be as agile as the business it serves or even more so. Today s IT department has to do more with less, and be more responsive to IT and business customers. With most companies complete dependence on information technology, the financial health of the enterprise can depend on IT s ability to perform more efficiently and at a higher level. It traditionally takes six months or longer to bring a new company into the fold. There are a lot of details and a high level of complexity involved. Harry Butler IT Project Manager, ESA Big company, small staff ESA has 18 operational support sites and five logistical operation centers across the U.S., plus a number of small operational sub-sites. The organization s more than 3,000 laptops and desktops run five different versions of Windows for business reasons. The company runs a wide variety of server platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Unix and Windows, with 225 Windows servers alone. To manage this mixed, geographically-dispersed environment, the company employs a modest IT staff of 48, who work out of the five operation centers. Harry Butler, IT Project Manager for ESA, understands the challenge his department faces. I have IT personnel at five sites who have to support 18 sites, says Butler. If we have to do everything the traditional way handling tasks and problems in person, for instance we can never make it. Efficiency and cost-cutting have become Butler s watchwords. He is spearheading a move to software- and platform-as-a-service solutions to reduce staff workloads, and is a strong proponent of off-the-shelf software over in-house development. 99.5% of the IT groups in corporate America are a financial drain on their companies, Butler declares. That s not going to happen here. We are all about finding smarter ways to deliver what the company needs. Acquisition headaches New acquisitions will play a major role in helping Elbit reach its billion-dollar revenue goal by the year In 2008, the company made two acquisitions that highlighted the challenges faced by ESA s IT department as they integrate and support new businesses as part of the existing enterprise infrastructure. We need to bring the acquired company to the same standard level of compliance, governance and IT management that we have at the rest of our sites, explains Butler. It traditionally takes six months or longer to bring a new company into the fold. There are a lot of details and a high level of complexity involved. As a result of these acquisitions, the IT team 2 CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH

5 has to integrate resources and systems which were not originally intended to work together. Servers and desktops have to be updated to company-standard software versions and security levels. Throughout the acquisition s integration, daily operations cannot be disrupted at either organization. Transition costs have a direct impact on ESA s bottom line. The longer it takes, the more costly the acquisition becomes. Speeding up the transition process is key to a company like ours, Butler says. Anything that helps us in that regard is worth its weight in gold. The cost of manufacturing downtime ESA s various manufacturing lines are very dependent on IT, as computers run equipment throughout the company s plants. Inevitably, either through system failure or required maintenance, disruptions can cause system downtime. In a manufacturing environment, this is a financial drain on the business. At ESA, the cost can be as high as $120,000 per minute. Obviously, the company wants to maintain as much system uptime as possible. Sometimes, we have to bring a system down because there s no other way around it, states Butler. But in many cases, it s a logical risk decision. Is what we re going to do absolutely necessary? Can we pinpoint the benefits that will come of it? If we can t answer those questions, we re just guessing, and with the money that s involved, that s just not good enough. The need for asset control At ESA, the need for effective asset management extends beyond IT assets. The lack of it can carry significant costs. In one instance, ESA s finance department failed an internal audit because it couldn t control assets properly. Personnel simply did not know where everything was, and believed there were over a million and a half dollars worth of missing assets at various company locations. This included equipment and components that would have to be replaced to meet operational requirements. The situation highlighted the need for a process or technology solution that would allow the company to know whether or not the assets were actually missing and, if not, where they were. Replacement expenditures could then be avoided. Asset management is required for numerous other, day-to-day decisions, also. For example, say that somebody needs a laptop in Texas and I have five sitting in New Hampshire, says Butler. It s a lot cheaper to send one from New Hampshire, build it out, and deliver it than to buy a brand-new laptop for the person in Texas. But first, I have to know those New Hampshire laptops are there. SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY Meeting business challenges through unified IT management In 1999, Elbit Systems of America recognized a need for more effective event monitoring on its networks and servers. After a 90-day evaluation cycle, ESA chose CA NSM based on CA s superior ability to promptly address network and systems management issues that arose during the test period. Today, ESA uses 14 CA products at its sites across the U.S. Its entire complex IT environment is managed through integrated CA products and solutions. We bought one small CA tool, CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH 3

6 implemented it, saw value, then went out and got a companion tool, explains Butler. We brought that in, integrated it with the first one, which gave us better value, so we brought in a third one. It s been an ongoing process, working with CA Technical Support and putting a solution together that s helped us manage our environment. We bought one small CA tool, implemented it, saw value, then went out and got a companion tool. Harry Butler IT Project Manager, ESA Improving service levels Our entire solution is centered on CA Service Desk Manager, says Butler. We have CA NSM tied into the service desk, so that as an event happens on a server, it generates an incident ticket and alerts our IT staff. We can then track that ticket and solve the problem. Feeds from the asset inventory component of CA IT Client Manager also automatically feed into CA Service Desk. If software is being delivered and it fails, that generates a Service Desk ticket. Service requests come in from CA Service Catalog and requests for change orders are generated inside of CA Service Desk. I haven t found any product so far that I can t integrate with CA Service Desk to generate an incident ticket or a request or a change order. It also gives me the information that I need for root cause analysis, and to look for systemic and recurring problems. It pulls everything together using the CA CMDB as the database backbone. Delivering services to my end users is so much easier than it used to be. Butler uses CA Service Desk in conjunction with the service level manager to monitor his performance and service level guarantees to ESA s business units. I pay penalties if I don t meet those service levels, Butler says, but I m old school. When I shake your hand, I make a commitment that I m going to meet. Butler uses CA Service Desk and reporting and CA Service Level and Catalog to meet agreed-upon requirements and expectations. He also uses the CA solutions to report back to the business units. It s not just me telling them that I met the SLA 99.4% of the time. They can perform an on-demand pull and get a report out of the system to see what s going on. Making the most of a limited IT staff CA IT Client Manager allows the company to manage all of its IT assets with a relatively small staff. Asset management, remote control, automated software delivery they allow us to cover a lot of ground, says Butler. An analyst sitting in California can work on a desktop problem in New Hampshire via a chat window or on the phone. My end user in New Hampshire doesn t care, just as long as they get their problem resolved. Butler makes full use of the automation capabilities made possible by the integrated CA products and solutions. Take software deployment as an example, Butler says. The end user requests the software from a drop-down list in CA Service Catalog. The request goes through an automated workflow process for approval. Once that s given, it opens a Service Desk ticket change order and another automated workflow begins. Web calls are sent into the software delivery system, the software is deployed to the client s box, and the installation is verified. If there are any patches that need to be installed, patch management in CA IT Client Manager handles that. Because of the high level of automation, the limited IT staff is free to tackle other higher value-added jobs. 4 CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH

7 Reducing transition times at acquired companies While the typical transition process used to take months, it now ranges from four to six weeks. We can turn on CA Service Catalog, bring the acquired company into the CA Service Desk system and use the CA IT Client tools to deploy software, says Butler. We use CA NSM to monitor events on their servers, and bring their servers and desktops up to enterprise standards. Patch management has allowed us to be able to bring new machines up to the enterprise patch level. It s automated, so I don t have to have someone go out and deploy the patch manually by hand. Of course, we still have our acquisition pain points, but with CA we have a way to alleviate them, or at least reduce them to a manageable level. In 2008, ESA obtained a rebranding authorization that allows the company to use its own logo on CA product screens. This helps ESA more rapidly establish a one company concept with the acquired company s users. Yes, it s a CA tool, explains Butler, but to the user it s the ESA Help Desk or the ESA Service Catalog. It s got our logo on it, so the replacement of their old applications makes sense to users. It says, You re part of the family now, we re going to help you. The logo makes that much of a difference. We can turn on CA Service Catalog, bring the acquired company into the CA Service Desk system and use the CA IT Client tools to deploy software. Harry Butler IT Project Manager, ESA Making better decisions at the factory Butler s IT team has different maintenance windows at ESA s various manufacturing locations. Using CA NSM, personnel capture system data and decide how to best maximize uptime and minimize the high cost of downtime. With the system visibility enabled by CA NSM, problems can be prevented before they can have an impact on production. IT staff also knows definitively when action must be taken. We re only reacting to those things that are true faults, claims Butler, and then, we can resolve faults much faster than before. We perform root cause analysis to find out exactly what happened and exactly what we have to do to fix the problem. Managing assets to manage costs The company uses CA Asset Portfolio to manage approximately 9,000 individual assets, including 3,000 IT assets. Elbit tracks assets such as forklifts, testers and other equipment that don t have a computer on them. You don t attach a keyboard to them, says Butler, but we know where they are, and can control the configuration and monitor the service and maintenance schedules and contracts. We know when the asset is going to reach the end of its useful life all of the information you need for asset portfolio management. Using the information, the company might decide to extend a maintenance contract as opposed to replacing an asset, which can result in considerable cost savings. When the Finance Department thought there were more than $1.5 million in lost assets around the company, Butler was able to show them where the assets were. We introduced some process and control, and implemented CA Asset Portfolio and CA CMDB. We started configuring each lost asset as an item and then referencing it back to, for example, a purchase order. Finally, we were able to account for everything they thought was missing. They were quite happy with that, and actually paid for the CA Asset Portfolio software. They made it a Finance initiative. CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH 5

8 Reducing the number of incidents According to Butler, IT actually causes 60% to 70% of all system and service incidents generated on a daily basis, though not all incidents result in service disruptions. This is mostly due to unauthorized changes or to making changes without knowing their full ramifications. CA CMDB allows ESA s IT team to virtualize changes before they re made, to see how they affect a service or string of services. When you re going to work on a particular server, do you really know everybody who s attached to it? asks Butler. With CA CMDB, you hit the visualizer button. You can see who s going to be affected upstream. You see who s going to be affected downstream. You can put them into scheduled maintenance windows and notify everyone who s going to be affected. AN INTEGRATED SOLUTION EXPANDING IT MANAGEMENT CAPABILITIES Using an integrated CA solution based on an Enterprise IT (EITM) approach, ESA s IT staff have been able to improve service levels across geographically dispersed business units and keep up with rapid company growth. Incident management represents approximately 25% of the total workload for Butler s group, a number that is steadily declining and is also well below the 30% goal set by his CIO. Automation is playing an important role in reducing the number of incidents at the company. Thanks to our integrated CA solution, we have repeatable processes that happen over and over and over again with no human involvement, Butler points out. You don t need a human to reboot a server or restart a process. You can automatically generate a problem ticket, and start a workflow that restarts the process and gets things back up and operational. FIGURE A Automated tasks and workflows Change, Configuration Networks, applications and Release and systems visibility Fewer service disruptions Remote software distribution Service Desk resolution Faster problem and Catalog Service Level Accurate asset tracking Asset Recovery Threat Data protection Business continuity 6 CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH

9 SECTION 3: BENEFITS Improving services while controlling costs By taking a holistic approach to IT management through their integrated CA products and solutions, Elbit has been able to: Improve service delivery in the face of service demand growth Increase IT staff efficiency Cut acquisition costs Increase manufacturing uptime Reduce expenditures related to assets The integrated CA solution gives Butler tangible metrics that he uses to demonstrate his department s effectiveness in supporting ESA s business. I m the metric king, he laughs. I can produce all kinds of numbers to show where we re providing definite value to the business. I couldn t do that without the CA tools. They allow me to pull all of that information together from the various systems and locations, so I come up with the numbers that the C-level officers and Board of Directors want to see. Butler is already looking forward to new CA offerings that can help him help the business. Traditionally, we ve always used the service management line, but now there s a governance line that s available, he says. I can take some of those CA solutions back to the business managers and show them that there are existing solutions for what they want to do. Butler is currently considering the Web-based CA GRC Manager On Demand solution to stay on top of ESA s complex web of regulatory and compliance mandates in the defense, aviation and medical markets. ESA s IT Project Manager views CA as a true partner. I work with other vendors, but CA has a different mindset when it comes to asking us what they can do to make us better and more profitable. They actually listen. The others will ask questions and take our response, but we never hear anything back. CA actually tracks it, and they talk to you, and you get status reports and updates. If I have an incident, I can instantly suggest a product enhancement. I know where it is while it s in evaluation. Nobody else has a process like that. It makes us feel like we re a valued partner to them as much as they are to us. In today s IT economics, rapid business growth must be successfully handled without a similar increase in IT staff. This calls for a strategic, integrated approach to IT management and service delivery utilizing advanced time- and labor-saving technologies. Such an approach brings scalability to staff performance, multiplying both the workload capabilities and the effectiveness of IT personnel. The agility of the IT department is increased, allowing it to meet the challenges of business growth while increasing the agility of the business overall. To learn more about the CA EITM architecture and technical approach, visit ca.com/us/enterprise-it-management.aspx. CUSTOMER TECHNICAL BRIEF: STREAMLINING IT MANAGEMENT TO MEET THE BUSINESS CHALLENGES OF RAPID GROWTH 7

10 CA, one of the world s largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT for greater business results. Our vision, tools and expertise help customers manage risk, improve service, manage costs and align their IT investments with their business needs.