Customer Success Story
Hasbro Plays Globally with BT Infonet
Providence, Rhode Island–headquartered Hasbro Inc., is a world leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of toys, games, interactive software, puzzles and infant products. The continual development and licensing of a portfolio of leading brands including classic Action Man, Star Wars and Monopoly; plus new introductions like Pokémon and Tweenies together with recent higher-tech family computer games and electronic toys, has driven Hasbro's global business to a turnover of over U.S. $3.3 billion in 1998.
Hasbro has been an BT Infonet customer for international data services for nearly nine years, starting with X.25 services for e-mail and later with Global Frame Relay (GFR) online. An advanced user of technology to assist in the development of its competitive position, Hasbro had adopted EDI for its larger partners and internal enterprise management systems from J.D. Edwards some years ago. With the experience of this early corporate e-commerce and enterprise integration, Hasbro was well positioned to deploy more advanced business solutions to enable their globalisation and rationalisation objectives and further enhance their competitive position. Two years ago Hasbro decided to deploy SAP globally and also to move towards the more centralised systems approach which underlies it, with an increasing dependence on their global network.
From Hasbro's experience their Vice President IS, International, Michael Elliott, already knew Hasbro needed a prioritised Wide Area Network (WAN) solution to ensure that business critical transactions took precedence over non-interactive traffic. Using bandwidth to solve the problem would be costly and the resulting reserve capacity unnecessary for most of the traffic. The class of service (CoS) solution offered by BT Infonet's GFR custom network options provided a highly customisable solution not available elsewhere, and designed exactly for this "multi- service" situation.
The traffic to be carried was split into the main categories of SAP transactions, SAP printing, GroupWise e-mail, FTP file transfer, IPX traffic, etc. As well, leading-edge technology reliability, high performance, flexibility, global coverage, absolute network resilience and value for their money were also key requirements.
By using BT Infonet's premium VC/Interactive CoS for SAP online transactions and routing other applications traffic over regular VC/Access GFR connections, Hasbro achieved expected performance from all its applications and maintained lower cost overall. To provide the required total reliability BT Infonet installed ISDN leased-line local loop backup to critical sites to complement its fault tolerant network cloud. The whole solution is already deployed and is currently supporting an expanding population of 26 sites worldwide.
Hasbro has commenced the construction of a 21st century e-business network extension to provide yet more sophisticated enterprise systems and secure remote access for employees and business partners, as well as marketing and transaction systems for its customers using the Internet.
BT Infonet is providing international network services to support this initiative globally. Managed Firewall Services (MFS) and Internet Services deliver the security and global access to the Internet. DialXpressTM Professional delivers secure and private remote access to Hasbro's systems through a local call in all the countries in which they are located.
A key part of BT Infonet's success in this account has been its responsiveness and flexibility in anticipating the services global enterprises like Hasbro need and then customising the network to specific applications and locations. This flexibility extends to the management of the account on three continents, where BT Infonet's local offices work directly with Hasbro's IT people in the UK, U.S., and Hong Kong through our globally managed Navigator program, which ensures all parts of the organisation are getting the services and support they need. "Global account management helps a lot, regional requirements are no longer an issue," says Elliott.
The benefits of working with a single integrated vendor for international services focused on building fully managed solutions customised to its technical and commercial needs are clear to Hasbro. Michael Elliott lists this flexibility as a key element in the service he gets. "Flexibility in all areas is very important to us, it allows us to deliver the benefits of our global systems investment," he concludes.