CPF chooses IBM Services to bring greater IT efficiency and resiliency to its food supply chain
Charoen Pokphand Foods PLC (CPF), a world leading agro-industrial and food conglomerate, has announced it will adopt IBM Multivendor Support Services (MVS) to improve IT efficiency and cost saving in its three data centers. CPF’s data centers are serving as the key engines behind its operations, including a distribution network spanning across Thailand.
CPF operates feed, farm and food businesses, including retail and food outlets. As the business continues to grow, CPF is working with IBM Services to simplify its IT operations across equipment maintenance, hardware support and vendor management. The partnership has lowered CPF’s equipment maintenance costs by 25%, and reduced time spent on IT management-related tasks by 20%. In addition, IBM has reduced the time CPF has previously needed to invest on managing IT vendor relationships, decreased overall operational risks, and deferred company’s capital expense.
IBM’s comprehensive support services and 24x7 service level availability, covers products from IBM and other OEMs, be it servers, storage, network, along with its support services nationwide. As CPF’s Multivendor Support Services provider, IBM also ensures systems availability to uphold uninterrupted operations for CPF. CPF can also access the IBM
Client Insights Portal that provides real-time inventory and risk reports.
“Innovation and technology have been the foundational pillars of our agro-industrial and food business’ success, especially in the current market volatility where enabling a connected supply chain to uninterruptedly serves consumers across Thailand is more crucial than ever,” said Mr. Prakob Rerkpreedapong, Senior VP of CPF IT Center Co., Ltd. “With IBM’s multivendor support services, we can now simply manage contract and service level availability from IBM, which is our single vendor. The IBM Client Insights Portal also allows us to monitor equipment in our data center, as well as the level of network vulnerability, giving us the ability to proactively turn the unanticipated into the envisioned, amid disruption and uncertainty.”
“IBM is delighted to bring our experience working with leading enterprises and government entities to optimise CPF’s hybrid IT environment, with stable and reliable systems and preventive maintenance to power its food business servicing consumers across Thailand,” said Ms. Patama Chantaruck, VP for Indochina Expansion and Managing Director of IBM Thailand. “IBM is pleased to help CPF unlock the value of hybrid cloud, so they can continue to transform their business and food products for the world.”
According to the Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) study conducted by Forrester [1] in 2019 with 266 customers, the IBM MVS provides organizations a net benefit of over THB96 million (USD$3.1 million) in a span of three years. The interviewed organizations shared that the useful life of hardware was extended by an average of 1.8 years. In addition, 42% of survey respondents said they saved or deferred capital expense by utilizing IBM MVS over prior solutions.
