“FedEx proactively stays at the forefront of technology to ensure business agility, and this project was no exception. With the refreshed environment, we’ve been able to layer on additional projects that would have otherwise had incremental financial costs associated with their infrastructure needs. It’s the unspent dollars that we are effectively saving because, thanks to HP and FoxNet, the infrastructure now has the capacity and flexibility to absorb more workload. It benefits our customers by enabling us to deliver better, faster services and at the same time save the company money.” – Terry Pavey, Managing Director of IT FedEx Canada

Parcel delivery giant, FedEx, has a corporate policy of utilizing the latest technology to facilitate the execution of leading-edge services for its customers. FedEx Canada operates within this business model, and it recently set about improving and consolidating key elements of its computing capability to become more economically efficient, and enable the company to even more swiftly embrace business changes via an adaptive IT enterprise.

Challenging HP
Terry Pavey, Managing Director of IT for FedEx Canada, explained, “We challenged HP to assist in locating the section of our IT infrastructure that would most benefit from consolidation and renewal. There were caveats introduced: The first hurdle was proving that HP could identify cost savings from the existing environment if it was to simply refresh and consolidate some older HP systems. The second hurdle was to architect and price separately the incremental capacity that was required by FedEx to accommodate budgeted growth over the next three to five years. Although the first hurdle in its own right represented a modest saving of $50,000 per year for FedEx, the combined proposal represented a potential $2 million saving for FedEx.”

If not already challenging enough, Pavey increased the complexity by limiting the selection of servers that FedEx Canada would consider deploying. He described, “Even though we are already standardized on HP at the vendor level, we continue to strive towards greater model standardization and consistency throughout our IT environment. We have a goal to minimize the number of different HP servers within the infrastructure because this will ultimately reduce our software development cycles and help us achieve faster time to market for new customer-oriented solutions.”

Evaluating potential solutions
Knowing the criticality for the IT infrastructure to complement and enhance business processes – in turn enabling the efficient delivery of customers’ packages – HP undertook the challenge and partnered with local reseller, FoxNet to explore potential solutions. FedEx Canada already had an extremely well documented architecture in place – details of operating system versions through to the costs associated with each server – which was a tremendous asset in the evaluation of the areas that would benefit most from a consolidation.

“Over a four-month period, we had some very intensive discussions around new server models, focus areas within our infrastructure, conceptual architecture designs, costs, etc. We constructed a number of potential models, looked at the pricing and capabilities, and compared them. It was very collaborative,” recalled Pavey.

The solution that emerged as the best fit against Pavey’s criteria leveraged HP marketing programs – including trade-in credits for licenses – to reduce the total cost of ownership. It comprised replacing five older servers with two of the latest-technology HP rp7410 servers.

Partitioning is critical for success
FedEx Canada has created a highly architected environment that maximizes every asset, while providing the highest level of business support. Pavey elaborated, “We have a lot of knowledge about our applications, permitting us to run them in a ‘stacked and shared’ mode with staggered maintenance windows. The hard and virtual partitioning offered by the HP rp7410 servers was attractive in its ability to allow us to better separate our applications within individual partitions.”

Customs processing software is an example of one of FedEx Canada’s business-critical applications. Based on pre-set customs criteria, the system provides customs inspectors with recommendations that in turn facilitate the processing of freight very quickly. If this system fails, FedEx Canada has to fall back to a manual process of handholding paperwork through customs clearance, which causes immense delays, storage issues and hold-ups in deliveries. Partitioning and virtual access to critical system resources were key to the success of the
new solution.

“The team did a fantastic job during the implementation,” reflected Pavey. “We’re constantly adding and changing our technology portfolio, so it had to be orchestrated in parallel with all of the other events in that same period. We saw no interruptions in service. It was a credit to the teamwork and partnership that allowed the deployment to go as fast and as smoothly as it did.”

Looking beyond modest monthly savings
With regard to the scale of the consolidation, Pavey commented, “The final proposal was not an attempt to replace the complete production environment. Moreover, it was a focused replacement and consolidation of an older section, allowing some of the servers to be cascaded to development environments and originally delivered modest monthly savings of $50K Canadian.”

More important than the initial cost savings, the revitalized infrastructure has opened up the bandwidth to embrace and in-source FedEx Latin America’s operations with no additional overhead. Pavey observed, “We’re leveraging the new infrastructure, using server partitioning to provide robust, discrete capabilities, into our Latin American operations, thereby avoiding the expense of a dedicated data center. This is how the operational savings associated with this consolidation have escalated to $2 million.”

He added, “By leveraging the Canadian infrastructure, the Latin America call centers will be able to more swiftly deliver responses to customer enquiries, interface with the sales force to give them real-time data on customers’ activities and enable customers to receive superior services from FedEx.”

Enhancing high availability testing
The critical systems environments that FedEx Canada maintains are the development, production and transitional “pre-production” configurations. Pavey elaborated, “The applications that we run are so critical to the business of delivering parcels to customers that we have to maintain a very high level of availability. All of the applications are tested for integration and we aim for the pre-production environment to mirror the production configuration as closely as possible. We follow a regimented set of processes to remove the risk of application failure in production; the HP server partitioning allows us to carefully match the pre-production and production configurations – enabling the highest levels of availability.”

The raw performance improvement experienced with the new servers has helped a scanning application to handle data from more packages in a shorter period of time. Pavey commented, “It allows a greater consolidation of freight and helps FedEx Canada to process the deliveries faster – dramatically benefiting our customers.

Delivering business agility
“The relationship with HP is a true partnership. We mutually profited from this relatively small consolidation and it mapped perfectly with our company goals. It’s given us an ability to get more applications to market for our customers – both custom solutions for larger customers and improvements in international shipping – in a cost-efficient and flexible way.”

He concluded, “FedEx proactively stays at the forefront of technology to ensure business agility, and this project was no exception. With the refreshed environment, we’ve been able to layer on additional projects that would have otherwise had financial costs associated with their infrastructure needs. It’s the unspent dollars that we are effectively saving because, thanks to HP and FoxNet, the infrastructure now has the capacity and flexibility to absorb more workload. It benefits our customers by enabling us to deliver better, faster services and at the same time save the company money.”

At a glance

• Company: Federal Express Canada Ltd.
• Headquarters: Mississauga, Ontario
• Founded: 1987
• Size: FedEx Canada employs more than 5,000 people in over 60 facilities coast-to-coast.
• Telephone: 1 800 GoFedEx
• URL: www.fedex.ca
• Primary business: A global logistics and transportation company offering domestic and international shipping and electronic commerce solutions. The company uses real-time package status tracking systems, automated customs clearance services and a dedicated air and ground transportation network to serve Canadian and global markets.

• Partner: FoxNet Inc.
• Location: Waterloo, Ontario
• Founded: 2001
• HP Experience: 45 person years
• Telephone: 519 886 8895
• URL: www.foxnetsolutions.com
• Primary services: HP based infrastructure, hardware, software and services.

	For more information on how working with HP can benefit you, contact your local HP sales representative, or visit us through the Internet at our world wide web address: http://www.hp.com