KSB Case study

Industry:

Manufacturing

Services:

Managed ServicesSD-WANSecurity/SASE/SSE

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Case study at a glance

COLLABORATE ACROSS DISCIPLINES

GREATER FLEXIBILITY & SECURITY

INTERNATIONALLY NETWORKED SITES

KSB SE & Co. KGaA, headquartered in Frankenthal, Germany, is a leading manufacturer of pumps, valves and associated services with annual sales of more than 2.2 billion euros. For more than 150 years, its pioneering products and services have helped customers drive innovation in their industries using KSB’s reliable solutions for transporting and controlling water, chemicals and other fluids. From its multi-award-winning business innovation laboratory to foundries and sales offices, KSB and its subsidiaries has sites around the world, including in India, Brazil and China.

15,000+

WORLDWIDE EMPLOYEES

190 SITES

80 AUTHORIZED SERVICE PARTNERS

30 SERVICE CENTERS

The Need

As KSB is a data-driven business, its employees rely on being able to collaborate across disciplines, creating groundbreaking services and production methods by leveraging pooled data and cutting-edge insights from fields as varied as hydraulics, materials technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Increasingly, new opportunities and business gains also depend on integration with KSB’s supply chain

Routine maintenance

The IT infrastructure supporting KSB’s business was largely particular to each site

Lack of bandwidth

Increase of 600%

Lacking flexibility

Needed to support its evolving IT infrastructure requirements and growing business supply chain and partner ecosystem

Our manufacturing and supply chains are becoming increasingly globalized, and we need a stable IT infrastructure at all locations. That’s why we decided to modernize our network structure.

Heinz Wackermann – Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations, KSB

The GTT Solution

A network for global manufacturing and supply chains

The KSB Group has around 190 sites and more than 15,000 employees working worldwide. As KSB is a data-driven business, its employees rely on being able to collaborate across disciplines, creating groundbreaking services and production methods by leveraging pooled data and cutting edge insights from fields as varied as hydraulics, materials technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Increasingly, new opportunities and business gains also depend on integration with KSB’s supply chain. Across Germany alone, the company works with a network of 30 service centers and 80 authorized service partners.

Greater flexibility and security

The onboarding phase for KSB’s switch from the previous MPLS network to the new SD-WAN platform began in September 2019. Over the next few months, GTT worked with KSB to develop a custom-fit solution to deploy SD-WAN across its sites. It was essential to build an agile and future-proof infrastructure that could grow in line with the company’s requirements.

Internationally networked sites and global service

In the meantime, the new SD-WAN-based network infrastructure has been implemented for almost all of the company’s sites, with the remaining subsidiaries to follow by the end of 2021. With the GTT managed service, KSB can now access a much more flexible network platform — a decisive advantage for the pump manufacturer.

This modern IT infrastructure supports not only the global group’s internal communications and data flows, but also the company’s own production processes. For instance, this applies to logistical processes with international aspects, such as the custom pump and valve solutions KSB delivers to its customers. For these, bespoke components are manufactured in different KSB plants and then assembled into the final product at a central location. The overall processing of these complicated special orders is now simpler and faster thanks to the new infrastructure. Shorter response and delivery times also increase plant availability for maintenance and repair orders for KSB customers.