With the population of children in the world close to 2 billion, the strain on operations at the North Pole was palpable. Chief of Operations, Elisa Elf, said there were white knuckle emergencies every December where the information pipeline would stall. She said, “Our naughty and nice analytics would be out-of-date and we would be overbuilding tricycles, when scooters were where the demand was.” The worst, of course, was if the Claus MRP system went down leaving millions of children to find uneaten cookies and milk and no presents under the tree on Christmas morning.
Elisa Elf continued, “We were constantly checking our systems, but sometimes a Severity One outage occurs out of nowhere and our screens go blank. When the big guy hears about it, he wants to know what we are doing to fix the situation. And believe me, you don’t want to be on his naughty list.”
Knowing that you have a problem is the first critical step to the solution, according to Charlois Caltdel, Polar IT Operations: “We want to go very quickly from when the problem shows up to when we recognize it is a problem and start deploying our teams to fix it.” The Elves were looking for a solution that could manage the high consequence outages from triage to resolution, remedy and restoration. It needed to allow for minute-by-minute control and communication with all of Santa’s teams (not just within Elf Operations but Sled Maintenance, Rudolph House and/or Weather Central.)
The solution they chose is Veoci. While the developers are in New Haven, the cloud-based solution is available everywhere. With it they are able to set up virtual collaboration rooms for each incident with side rooms for specialists. The collaboration rooms provide the means to manage conversations, email, data and tasks. For example, the elves were able to just upload their spreadsheets into forms that they could create on the fly. And when an outage occurs, they are able to ask the whole team to collaborate.
As Elisa Elf said, “The key to making our decision was seeing a demo of Veoci.
The solution is very powerful, and when we saw how it was designed for the real world of IT, we knew it could work for Santa, too.”
Feel free to reach out to us, we’d love to show you what we did for Santa.
