PVM India Sweetens Offerings With Citrix Mobility Soln

Perfetti Van Melle (PVM) is a name that is often said in the same breath as ‘candy’ and is a company that finds its place among top-notch confectionaries worldwide. PVM’s value is estimated to be $170 million and its establishment comprises three factories, 38 depots and four branch offices in India. The company manufactures brands such as Alpenliebe, Center Fresh, Chlor-mint, Cofitos, Center Shock, Mentos and Happydent White.

To ensure high levels of information optimisation leading to solid business intelligence, PVM invested in SAP R/3 4.7 in 2003. However, over time and with the rollout of more SAP modules in 2005, application availability became a concern for different sets of professionals within the organisation - including PVM India’s nationwide sales force, which was primarily deployed on the field. Specifically, bandwidth constraints were impacting application performance, and mobile workers, who did not have access to laptops, were unable to carry on their work while traveling. With an aim to solve this issue, PVM began scouting the market for an apt solution and zeroed in on Citrix’s offering – ‘Citrix Application for Mobility’, which seemed to fit the bill just right.

The Business Requirement

While the Cisco VPN client that PVM India was using was effective in securing data transmission, slow speed and unavailability of applications were becoming major concerns. For example, decision making was hampered because company professionals did not have access to laptops all the time. Local users had to contend with machine upgrades.

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Due to the opening of multiple sessions and use of a graphical interface, SAP screens were getting loaded on local machines. Users in remote locations complained about slow response times. At times, corruption of SAP GUI due to virus issues required a complete re-installation of Windows, SAP GUI and anti-virus software, and at times even printing operations were disrupted due to driver corruption as the company had no direct control over remote environments.

As such IT staff or engineers had to travel to different locations to address these issues and fix the often-arising application access problems. “There was a clear requirement for better and faster availability of core business applications and optimised bandwidth performance,” explains Basant Kumar Chaturvedi, senior manager–IT, PVM, India.

The project was aimed at enabling secure Enterprise Application access anywhere, anytime for Perfetti Van Melle (PVM) India employees by providing:

• Higher bandwidth utilisation for various centralised applications (Cost saving on bandwidth)
• Secure access of all applications across the globe (Anytime, anywhere)
• Enabling on-the-go access to applications like SAP, secondary sales and File server on smartphones, thus, overriding the limitation of using laptops for information access (Increased productivity and business agility)
• The project focused on ensuring better optimisation of the existing infrastructure while enabling mobility through secure access to critical business applications.

Three-Phased Implementation

PVM India decided to approach the implementation in a phased manner to reap the full benefits of the technology by dividing the deliverables systematically. Citrix’s involvement in providing the necessary guidance while delivering the solution along with the solution partner helped PVM India in assuring timely and effective deliverables.

In Phase I, PVM India decided to address bandwidth and performance concerns for all those applications, which were accessed through the central site across India. Thus, users got access to SAP, critical locations, other applications and file server using Citrix Program Neighbourhood.

In Phase II, the focus was to enable access to business critical applications anywhere, anytime. One of the concerns was securing this access as PVM India’s critical facilities were getting exposed to the outside world now. For security purpose, Citrix Appliance Gateway was used, which in turn uses industry-standard 128/168-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt traffic.

In Phase III, emphasis was laid on fortifying agility in decision making by introducing enterprise application access on smartphones. PVM India had already initiated the usage of Push mail technology to bring mobility. The need was to further strengthen it by providing critical application access without compromising security and performance. Induction of Citrix Client for Windows Mobile professional version enabled access of SAP and other applications, which not only provided various MIS, but also made it more interactive for employees to give review and provide various approvals on the move.

Key Features and Benefits

Talking about the benefits, Chaturvedi says, “In the current environment, there is higher availability of applications through server load balancing while optimisation of bandwidth has improved application performance over existing networks. Through usage of the Citrix solution, we have clearly eliminated delays in application delivery and achieved higher business productivity and better end-user satisfaction. We have also restricted and secured application delivery over the LAN and WAN.”

He adds, “Through the Citrix application for secure mobility, we have been able to provide access to the mobile staff across India. We can’t think of a location where this application is not available. More than 150 mobile employees are using it to access information through their laptops or smartphones. Stationed employees across the country are also using this application. The application is used across departments and across the organisational hierarchy, wherever one can think of, thus, saving on bandwidth. Administrative staff, mobile staff and ‘C’ class employees – all are using it.”

With enhanced agility and mobility, PVM India is now set to meet its customers with a refreshed boutique.