BELLMER began life as a paper mill, established in Germany in 1842 by Karl Bellmer. Six generations on, the family still runs the business, and BELLMER has grown to become a leading manufacturer of paper production equipment. With customers all over the world, it now operates in both China and Spain.
The company invests heavily in staff development, and works hard to ensure that employees have the tools they need to make the most of their skills. It was for this reason – and to support continuing growth – that BELLMER decided to build a new IT infrastructure. In particular, it recognised that computer-aided design (CAD) teams would benefit from faster hardware and wider network bandwidth. They had to wait six minutes to open a 15-megabyte drawing and often had to stop working altogether if a system failure occurred. The IT team drew on the expertise of its long-term solution provider – Dell Preferred Partner Abtis. With support from Dell PartnerDirect and strong communication between all three parties, it took just five weeks to move from the initial planning phase to implementation, and only six weeks to complete the upgrade.
Design engineers at BELLMER are now better equipped to create new customer solutions quickly, thanks to an IT backbone based on virtualized Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell PowerVault storage in conjunction with Dell PowerConnect switches. They can open 15-megabyte files in three seconds through an upgraded network infrastructure, and they experience minimal interruptions because faster server restarts have cut downtime – as well as reducing maintenance for the IT team. The company estimates that its engineers are 35% more productive, and puts overall savings through increased uptime at €100,000 a year. What’s more, senior staff can make timely, well-informed decisions with 40% faster access to reports from the firm’s enterprise resource planning system. As BELLMER hoped, the renewed infrastructure has brought benefits to staff across the business, ensuring they can deliver the expertise and timely solutions customers have come to expect.
You can read the case study in full here, or click on the image below: