01
Client Profile & Background
A large manufacturing company in Bekasi, Indonesia, specializing in automotive components, operates a 24/7 production facility with over 2,000 employees. The company relies heavily on IT systems for ERP, supply chain management, and automated production lines. Their existing infrastructure, built over a decade ago, consists of legacy servers from HP and Dell, with a mix of Cisco switches and Fortinet firewalls. The IT team manages 50 virtual machines running on VMware vSphere, with backup solutions using tape drives. The company is planning a major IT refresh to support Industry 4.0 initiatives, including IoT sensors and real-time analytics. Due to the scale of the project, the procurement team decided to use a Multi Vendor BOQ to ensure competitive pricing and access to the latest technologies.
The company's IT manager, with 15 years of experience, recognized that single-source procurement had led to vendor lock-in and inflated costs in the past. By adopting a Multi Vendor BOQ, they aimed to standardize hardware specifications, reduce procurement cycles, and achieve better service level agreements (SLAs). The project scope included upgrading the entire server and storage infrastructure, replacing the network backbone, and implementing a modern backup and disaster recovery solution.
02
Technical Challenge
The primary technical challenge was the aging infrastructure's inability to support the company's growth. The existing servers, with an average age of 7 years, experienced frequent downtime, causing production losses of up to 3 hours per month. The backup system relied on tape drives, resulting in a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 48 hours, far exceeding the business requirement of 1 hour RPO and 2 hours RTO. Additionally, the network switches were operating at 80% capacity, leading to packet loss during peak production shifts. The company also needed to comply with new data sovereignty regulations requiring local data storage. The IT team estimated that the total cost of downtime exceeded IDR 500 million per incident, making the infrastructure upgrade a top priority.
Another challenge was the lack of standardized procurement processes. Previously, each department sourced IT equipment independently, resulting in incompatible hardware and fragmented warranties. The Multi Vendor BOQ needed to unify specifications across all vendors, ensuring that quotes were comparable. The procurement team had to define exact technical requirements, including CPU cores, RAM, storage IOPS, and network throughput, to avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons. This required close collaboration between the IT and procurement departments.
03
Implemented Solution
The solution involved a comprehensive Multi Vendor BOQ process. The IT team, in partnership with Intilogy, created a detailed Bill of Quantities covering 10 server nodes, 2 storage arrays, 20 network switches, 5 firewalls, and a backup appliance. The BOQ was sent to multiple vendors, including Lenovo, HP, Dell, Cisco, Fortinet, Synology, and Veeam. Each vendor provided separate quotes for hardware, software, and services. The evaluation criteria included total cost of ownership, warranty terms, and technical compliance. After two rounds of bidding, the company selected a combination of Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, Dell PowerVault storage, Cisco Catalyst switches, and Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. For backup, they chose Synology NAS appliances with Veeam Backup & Replication software.
The implementation was phased over six months. The first phase involved deploying the new servers and storage in a hyperconverged configuration using VMware vSAN, eliminating the need for separate SAN switches. The network upgrade included replacing all edge switches with Cisco Catalyst 9300 series and implementing a new networking architecture with redundant links. The firewall upgrade to Fortinet FortiGate 600F provided advanced threat protection and SD-WAN capabilities. The backup solution was designed with a 3-2-1 rule: three copies of data on two different media, with one offsite copy replicated to a Synology at the disaster recovery site. The entire solution was integrated with existing monitoring tools via SNMP and APIs.
04
Results & ROI
The Multi Vendor BOQ resulted in a 22% cost reduction compared to the initial single-vendor estimate, saving the company IDR 1.8 billion. The new infrastructure achieved a 99.99% uptime in the first year, reducing production downtime from 3 hours per month to zero. The backup solution improved RPO from 24 hours to 1 hour and RTO from 48 hours to 2 hours, meeting the business requirements. The network upgrade eliminated packet loss and reduced latency by 40%, improving ERP response times. The company also achieved compliance with data sovereignty regulations by keeping all data within Indonesia. The ROI was realized within 18 months, considering the avoided downtime costs and operational efficiencies. The IT team now has a standardized procurement process that can be reused for future expansions, ensuring consistent quality and competitive pricing.
Additionally, the project enabled the company to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies. The new infrastructure supports IoT sensors on the production floor, with real-time data analytics running on the hyperconverged platform. The backup solution provides instant recovery for critical VMs, and the firewall's SD-WAN feature optimized connectivity to the company's other factories in Java. The success of this project has led the company to adopt a Multi Vendor BOQ for all future IT procurements, including hybrid cloud and cybersecurity initiatives.
