Abercrombie & Fitch Finds the Right Fit with Marathon Automated High Availability and Dematic Automated Material Handling Systems
THE COMPANY
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. is a leading apparel retailer for men’s, women’s and kid’s casual clothes and accessories. Its headquarters and central campus, including its two major distribution centers, are located in New Albany, Ohio. Responsible for managing apparel for more than 1,000 stores in North America, including online requests, each distribution center is approximately one million square feet. Both centers include more than 23 miles of material handling equipment within the automated material handling system developed by Dematic Corp., one of the world’s leading suppliers of logistics automation solutions.
THE SITUATION
To manage the distribution centers’ conveyer and sorting systems, as well as the essential utility functions of the 16 buildings on the Home Office campus, Craig Moore, Senior Manager of Facilities at Abercrombie & Fitch, utilizes a graphic system monitor developed by Dematic Corp. and Abercrombie & Fitch. The graphic system monitor, which uses Iconics Web HMI software, integrates real-time manufacturing and utility information into a common, Web-enabled virtualization dashboard, enabling Moore and his team to monitor utilities and key manufacturing data and trends.
“Every minute counts when you are managing a large number of buildings and pieces of equipment,” said Moore. “We rely on our graphic system monitor on a daily basis for automatic alarm notification to manage campus buildings and run the distribution centers efficiently. We cannot afford for our graphic system monitor to go down – it is our eyes and ears for the operation 24/7.”
Moore recognized that the system that the Web HMI software was running on was outdated and would not provide the seamless, real-time synchronized data and systems protection the graphic system monitor required. Craig and his team began searching for a high availability solution that could continuously protect Abercrombie & Fitch’s critical monitoring and alarming applications. “The Web HMI software was running on a standalone server, If the Web HMI monitoring and alarming applications went down we lost our automated alarm notification and possibly valuable trend data - including critical utility data,” added Moore. “We were looking for a solution with real-time synchronization that would not let us down.”
THE SOLUTION
After a detailed evaluation process, Abercrombie & Fitch and Dematic selected everRun®, Marathon’s automated high availability software, to protect the graphic system monitor and to meet the campus’ high availability requirements.
“Marathon’s everRun software met our needs better than anything else we evaluated. Its real-time synchronization ensures that even in the event of a hardware failure, our conveyer and sorting systems would operate uninterrupted - without any loss of critical trend data,” said Moore.
The everRun software pools the physical resources of two Windows servers allowing them to function as a single, fully redundant Windows server. If one server stops running due to any failure, the graphic system monitor continues to operate uninterrupted using the other server. “Our team purchased, installed, and configured the everRun software quickly and easily,” said Moore.
Following the successful implementation of everRun with the graphic system monitor, Moore realized their sorting system needed the same availability protection. The sortation systems were running on redundant systems with a shared disk array that made them vulnerable to downtime and data loss. “Similar to having two cars and one engine, once the engine goes down, neither of the cars can run. If sortation system’s shared disk array went down, we could not sort product,” added Moore.
Moore approached technology partner Dematic with the goal of integrating everRun and Dematic’s Sort Director solution, software designed to optimize carton routing and sorting for distribution centers. In lock-step with the team from Dematic, Moore began a complete system upgrade to the distribution center’s warehouse control system using the everRun software to ensure 100 percent availability of the sorting systems.
“We have everRun integrated within the distribution center’s operating systems to ensure the conveyer and sorting systems continue computing through any hardware or server failures,” said Mark Vaughan, Business Development Manager of Dematic Corp. “Marathon’s solution is now supporting the heart of the material handling system at Abercrombie & Fitch.”
THE RESULTS
Today, Abercrombie & Fitch uses Marathon’s everRun high availability software to support approximately 60,000 data points critical to the retailer’s manufacturing facilities, including 14 office buildings, two mechanical buildings and the two central distribution centers. Since implementing Marathon’s everRun solution, Abercrombie & Fitch has experienced zero server downtime throughout its campus.
“Since implementing everRun over two years ago, we’ve had 100% server uptime and no data loss on the systems we are running Marathon’s solution,” said Moore. “Marathon’s software was everything we thought it was – and more. It’s been a great partnership. When we’ve needed it, we’ve always got great support from Marathon.”
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