Business Connexion has been awarded a three-year tender for managed support at SAPREF, the oil refinery in Durban co-owned by Shell Southern Africa and BP Southern Africa, bringing to four the number of major business wins in the region for September.
In terms of the deal, Business Connexion will support and maintain the desktop environment, including hardware and software and some server software, such as operating systems. Business Connexion is also responsible for the management of physical cabling for both voice and data traffic.
"In our tender documents we emphasised the total cost of ownership saving an organisation such as SAPREF could derive from their investment in current server and desktop operating systems," says Tim Genders, programme director - managed support at Business Connexion.
Other contracts Business Connexion secured in this period in KZN were BoE, Richards Bay Minerals and McCarthy Holdings.
SAPREF is the largest refinery in the country with a refining capacity to process 180 000 barrels of crude a day.
The refinery employs about 600 full-time staff and up to 600 contractors on average. For these people, IT has to supply critical services such as business applications, e-mail, messaging, storage and file servers embracing two Terabytes of data, workstations, anti-virus protection and the physical layer that facilitates internetworking. This consists of Cisco routers with Nortel switches forming the backbone between three sites in the greater Durban area. A Siemens PBX connects the voice lines.
SAPREF operates 640 Dell OptiPlex workstations and Latitude notebooks. Compaq servers are used for corporate application operations, file sharing and general storage, while three Dell 6400 servers host the SAP R/3 ERP system. The company has standardised on Windows 2000 and XP as its operating systems, Microsoft Exchange for messaging and e-mail, and Microsoft Office XP on the desktop. There is also a range of departmental and specialist solutions deployed in various areas around the refinery.
"Because we have a large, critical environment that also links into the Shell and BP systems, high availability is a key concern for IT," says Norman Warren, user support manager at SAPREF. "That`s why we negotiated four-, six- and 24-hour service level agreements with Business Connexion."
Business Connexion operates a helpdesk for SAPREF and is ultimately responsible for a number of areas of IT at SAPREF.
The primary role of IT skills retained by SAPREF is the operation of the refinery`s business systems and supporting facilities (a separate function from pant control and optimisation). Network, server and workstation support are managed through a single-vendor contract and appropriate sub-contracts.
"The alternative is to manage many contractors, with consequent risks to our operation. Where we can we simplify the issue through joint service contracts. Consortiums deliver the solution we need through a single vendor which is ultimately responsible for the entire solution. It removes the lack of overall answerability often associated with multiple-vendor contracts," says Warren.
Business Connexion delivers key performance indicators on a monthly basis, including full management reports of the environment, what faults occurred, the number of support calls, time to respond and resolve, server health, utilisation and trends, network usage and trends and storage utilisation and trends.
SAPREF needs these to effectively manage its partnership with Business Connexion and other contracted companies.
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