Background
Bakkavor are the leading manufacturer of fresh prepared food, operating over 31 sites across the UK and United States. Their UK operations supply around 1,650 products to large scale grocery retailers such as Waitrose, Tesco, ASDA, Morrisons, and M&S, amongst others.
The Requirement
IMS have been supporting the Bakkavor IBM i system for many years, helping with day-to-day routine issues such as record locks, all the way to large-scale development projects implementing crucial business efficiency initiatives. With a group revenue of over £2bn, their IBM i system is critical to their business operations. Bakkavor required a collaborative approach to their system management to ensure business continuity in the event of any technical issue.
The Solution
Although Bakkavor have a third-party hardware maintenance provider to maintain their IBM i server, as part of their application support maintenance contract with IMS, they received Message Monitor, an essential tool developed by IMS to monitor the potentially hundreds of messages that can be sent out by the IBM i server, often reporting system issues. If missed, these can lead to very serious issues, for example a hardware failure, which could potentially severely impact Bakkavor operations.
The Outcome
The IMS team, familiar with both the Bakkavor system as well as boasting over 35 years of experience in the IBM i platform, have the resources to proactively monitor all Message Monitor messages to:
- Track subsystem jobs and send an alert if a job has been running for more than a pre-defined period of time.
- Whitelist or blacklist messages.
- Log messages that require action on the IMS ITSM system and email the ticket details to specified Bakkavor contacts.
- Log a call with Bakkavor’s hardware maintenance provider (often done before the hardware maintenance provider notices the issue, ensuring swift resolution before operations are impacted).
- Clear a blocked queue which may hold up system jobs and cause operational delays.
“To be completely honest, we rely solely on IMS to monitor and flag activity on the AS400 message queue. Your team’s proactive approach has been a huge help in keeping things running smoothly. Whether it’s disc capacity alerts, routine job failures, or hardware-related issues, IMS consistently picks up on these and contacts the Bakkavor Support Service Desk to raise awareness.
Once we’re notified, we log a ticket on our side for reference, and IMS typically takes the lead on investigating and resolving the issue. Where needed, you also guide us toward the right escalation path — whether that’s reaching out to the business directly or involving Service Express, who host the AS400 for us.
This setup has worked really well for us. The monitoring provides peace of mind, and the responsiveness from IMS means we’re rarely caught off guard. We genuinely rate the service highly and appreciate the partnership — especially the communication and support you personally provide.”
Nathan Hedaux, Service Delivery – Senior Support Specialist, Bakkavor Information Technology
For more information about implementing Message Monitor or any other IBM i-related services, contact the IMS team today.
Call 0845 130 8499 or email solutions@imsolutions.info
