Executive Plantensive optimizes supply chain planning for Norwex with Blue Yonder hosted on AWS
Norwex, a multinational direct sales company with a mission to ‘improve quality of life by radically reducing chemicals in our homes’ sells products in twenty-three countries across four continents. The company partnered with Blue Yonder, a Tier One business application for supply chain management. Following significant and continuous growth, Norwex sought a third-party host for its Blue Yonder application and chose
AWS partner
Plantensive, a global supplier of supply chain and retail planning solutions.
Growth requires modernization of supply chain management
As its global expansion drove year on year growth, Norwex sought to modernize and evolve the capabilities of its on premises supply chain management system. The management system had previously been monitored and managed through spreadsheet data that required time consuming manual input. Norwex required comprehensive, flexible and data sensitive end-to-end hosting and batch processing to support their Blue Yonder application and its global community of users. Norwex sought a cost-efficient solution that could provide advisement in strengthening its global inventory plan, as well as supply IT support to implement operational modernization. Norwex also sought a solution that could scale quickly to accommodate growth. As the Norwex team vetted solutions to host the company’s Blue Yonder application, they prioritized the need for a fast and seamless deployment. Norwex onboarded Plantensive, an end-to-end supply chain solutions provider. With an eye towards helping customers accelerate growth and value, Plantensive leveraged the speed, flexibility and scalability of the AWS cloud and the capabilities of Blue Yonder, a tier one supply chain planning solution, to enhance business processes and performance at Norwex.
“If you looked at the AWS stack, we probably use about three quarters of the services in total. AWS gives us the ability to extend that application and make sure that there's low latency, good user experience and then multiple options to deploy new environments.”
- Ben Kriebel, Plantensive Partner
AWS bolsters security while keeping pace with global growth, empowering more expansion
Plantensive migrated the Blue Yonder supply chain application suite at Norwex to the AWS cloud within a few months. Optimized with the speed, agility, and embedded security features of AWS, Plantensive hosted the application on a flexible infrastructure that was easily scaled as the company continued its rapid expansion, opening several warehouses in new regions around the world. The full management of the infrastructure virtually eliminated Norwex’s IT footprint in direct management, significantly reducing overhead, while supplying batch monitoring, and database tuning.
Plantensive enabled the Norwex team to focus on continued innovation and expansion instead of infrastructure. Additional support from Plantensive and AWS included customer service, network security, and the facilitation of secure data movement across the company’s global channels. Derek Cesarz, Managing Director at Plantensive, elaborates, “With AWS, everything technical is fully managed including network security, monitoring of their planning processes that run and move data in and out of the system and the recalculation of new inventory and purchase orders. Data flows correctly, there are no errors, and there is reliable disaster recovery.”
With global expertise in supply chain management, Plantensive also guided Norwex with consultation, management, and resources including individualized demand forecasts from each global region, and guidance on optimizing the ROI of their strategy, inventory plan improvement, and advisement to help the company sync with local demands across the globe.
“There are 60 or 70 different components of EC2. We use probably every one of those. If you looked at the AWS stack, we use about three quarters of the services in total. AWS gives us the ability to extend an application and make sure that there's low latency, good user experience and then multiple options to deploy new environments.”
- Ben Kriebel, Plantensive Partner
AWS supports global expansion while maintaining low latency
Several AWS services are critical to the superior end-to-end IT support and maintenance that Plantensive provides for its customers. Plantensive leverages Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) for instances, backup functionality and strategy with Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and snapshots. Amazon Simply Cloud Storage Service (S3), Amazon High-Performance Block Storage (EBS) and CloudFront often factor heavily into Plantensive’s deliverables for Norwex and other customers. With AWS, Norwex experienced high availability, maintaining a 99.9% service level. Plantensive Partner Ben Kriebel explains the value of Amazon services in Plantensive’s daily operations.
“There are 60 or 70 different components of EC2. We use probably every one of those. If you looked at the AWS stack, we use about three quarters of the services in total. AWS gives us the ability to extend an application and make sure that there's low latency, good user experience, and then multiple options to deploy new environments.”
With continued global growth and development, Norwex seems poised to continue its partnership with Plantensive and AWS.
Norwex offers improved customer experience
Norwex has enhanced its ability to give a seamless experience to its customers, and built a much more efficient, and integrated internal infrastructure. They have set themselves up to scale for growth, operate effectively in an increasingly complex global supply chain and better integrate all their sales and production facilities for a more consistent approach to supply chain management.
