In the next installment of our Q&A series with members of the RF Code team, we spoke to Marty Johnstone, our newest sales engineer. Marty was previously a customer of RF Code at CME Group, and as such he brings a unique perspective on how RF Code's real-time operational intelligence brings value in the marketplace. In this first portion of a two-part interview we asked him to tell us of his experience.
You joined RF Code having managed the first implementation of the company’s technology at the CME Group. Why did the CME Group choose RF Code?
We were at a crossroads. We were building a new data center and had just gone through some management changes. The company wanted to redefine and refine its current data center management practices.
The company decided to pilot two solutions, RF Code being one option. I worked out that deploying RF Code would cost 40% less than the alternative.
The savings were a no-brainer so I got the go ahead to start implementing RF Code technologies.
How did the installation go?
We were able to deploy the solution without a lot of internal resources thanks to RF Code’s support team who were there to answer questions whenever I needed them.
We started collecting data in our 425,000sqft site in Aurora, Illinois and then began retrofitting our other sites with RF Code technology. I led the project to roll out the technology worldwide which included four data centers, multiple offices and hubs.
How did RF Code help you and your team at the CME Group?
The support team were great. There was a situation where we had an issue on a Sunday morning. I sent an SOS out to the support team and they sent six engineers over!
At CME Group, most data center maintenance work had to be performed out of hours to prevent interruption to customer services. RF Code’s support team were always there to help and were always quick to respond.
So the project was a success! What happened next?
In the meantime, we were working through our asset management. Around four times a year the finance department would conduct audits. CME Group wanted to improve the process to become more efficient and accurate.
I was tasked with finding a proof of concept and proving to the finance department that the solution worked. Finance and data center stakeholders came to the main site and I demonstrated the RF Code solution’s ease of use.
At the time we were using passive technology, which was a manual process, and we couldn’t update asset locations. I worked out that on average we moved an asset eight times in its lifecycle which meant having to manually update its location status 20 times in its lifecycle. This meant 20 opportunities for error.
How did RF Code’s asset management solution benefit the company?
Using RF Code’s asset management monitoring solution meant the process would involve only two steps – initial set-up of an asset and then decommission at the end of its life as opposed to 25 steps, which multiplied by the number of assets in our data centers would have been resource intensive!
In the original setup, an asset audit would normally take three months to complete and required 10-12 employees. With RF Code, this time was reduced to just two weeks and three full time employees. Accuracy increased from 85% to 99.98% and, as our goal was only 94% accuracy, we were more than happy with the solution!
How did this benefit you personally?
The success with RF Code meant I was put in charge of managing an asset management team, something that probably wouldn’t have been able to exist before we’d started using the solution.
The greatest reward for me was hearing executives and other departments quoting the reports we’d created using RF Code, proving that people really were using the solution to its full advantage to give us better insight and to save us unnecessarily buying assets we didn’t need!
