CA software supports Lacoste owner's global expansion

Devanlay, the owner of luxury clothes brand Lacoste, has deployed two CA Service Automation Solutions to optimise its global production planning.

CA Workload Automation is the first of the solutions, and manages the company's schedule of workloads during the production planning process.

The company has also implemented CA Process Automation, which has removed the need for manual auditing.

The move follows Devanlay's expansion from pure textile production into the global product distribution market, which caused a significant expansion of the group's IT infrastructure.

Laurent Caroujat, head of planning in Devanlay's information systems department, explained how the expansion was the driver for the adoption of CA's automated solutions.

"Previously, production planning was carried out by one employee in each business and was fragmented," he said.

"Following globalisation, manual fulfillment of orders in different time zones caused problems and forced us to rethink our information support systems."

Devanlay required a planning solution that could schedule event-based workloads across a complicated infrastructure that would be used by non-technical staff.

CA Workload Automation was implemented in less than two months with no disruption to business.

Some 600 planning jobs were migrated to the new system, which now manages more than 2,800 jobs.

"Our planning process has evolved considerably in recent years," explained Caroujat. "From locally based ad-hoc planning, we have moved to a permanent global schedule with the help of this automation system. We are now ready to meet the company deadlines, such as the launch in 2011 of Lacoste leather goods."

In the wake of the success of the Workload Automation, Devanlay has also implemented CA's Process Automation software. The solution automates IT processes using Microsoft Exchange's connector.