Industry type
Revenue
units sold in US
The company transformed into a mammoth in the industry, achieving a 23% increase in revenue in 2023, nearly doubling its business since 2020.
Over 63% of New Balance's online customers in 2023 were new, and with a 35% rise in the customer count in Europe and over 20% in the US, the company has established itself as a key player in the industry. One in every 10 shoes in the United States is a New Balance, with more than 15% market share in the country's footwear.
The company has integrated innovative manufacturing practices and cutting-edge digital strategies to cater to a global customer base. New Balance has expanded its footprint and brand reputation with a well-established presence in EMEA and APAC regions, through high quality product offerings and efficient operations. Its strategic use of MPLS-based WAN network has enabled the organization to effectively manage a distributed workforce of 7000 employees globally, owing to the impressive USD 7 billion annual revenue.
The manufacturing and retailing process of New Balance is complex, spanning from design to delivery, with each stage heavily dependent on advanced IT systems and robust network infrastructure to ensure that the operations are seamlessly carried out with high efficiency and accuracy.
Product design, material sourcing and manufacturing processes heavily rely on IT systems like PLM, ERP and MES to ensure smooth operations. PLM software enables global collaboration on product designs, while ERP systems track the raw materials and inventory. The MES monitors production efficiency and quality in real time. These systems rely on high-performance, consistent network bandwidth for data sharing, real-time updates, and seamless communication, making them critical to business success.
New Balance's IT infrastructure, with 1000 devices and 717 interfaces, is split amongst multiple specialized teams, each tasked with managing crucial aspects of the company's operations. These include networking, infrastructure security, desktop technology group, cloud networking, and app services teams. This unavoidable complexity of the setup presents significant hurdles in monitoring and managing the company's scaling WAN. With retail outlets across the globe, connectivity issues can directly impact the checkout process, impacting the customer experience and leading to significant revenue and sales loss.
Earlier, New Balance faced difficulties in managing their WAN circuits, especially around issues involving high packet loss and troubleshooting time. The IT team's difficulty in mapping out utilization trends on their WAN circuits made it highly challenging to plan for capacity upgrades and to address performance issues proactively. This was especially highly business critical in the retail operations where every second of downtime could result in customer dissatisfaction, followed by lost sales. High traffic utilization and downtime makes the checkout process difficult, resulting in customer frustration.
The Network Operations Center team would follow a reactive approach of identifying connectivity issues and reporting them to regional teams. However, this approach often led to delays in addressing issues, making it essential for a more proactive solution.
One of the significant hurdles faced by the company on the manufacturing front was managing multiple critical applications that oversee various stages of the production process. Each of these applications plays a pivotal role in ensuring smooth operations, and any downtime could lead to financial losses for New Balance. The lack of comprehensive visibility into the real-time status of these critical applications posed a serious threat to the IT team. They found it impossible to address any issue promptly, resulting in regular delays affecting the efficiency of the production workflow.
The IT team needed to implement a proactive bandwidth monitoring solution, focusing on key metrics such as utilization and packet loss. It needed a system that could give them real-time insights into network performance, ensuring any potential issues be identified and resolved before they impacted operations.
NetFlow Analyzer not only helps in maintaining seamless retail transactions but also in optimizing the network across manufacturing units. By leveraging better monitoring and predictive analytics, New Balance could ensure that both their manufacturing processes and retail operations run smoothly, ultimately supporting business continuity and customer satisfaction.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer helps monitor critical applications running on servers that rely on WAN links in manufacturing facilities, optimizing traffic flow to prevent production delays. When the site teams report any slowness, NetFlow Analyzer displays detailed site utilization and traffic patterns across MPLS circuits, thereby allowing the IT team to adjust bandwidth allocation, reducing costs to be paid to service providers.
NetFlow Analyzer's threshold alerts help find high utilization early on, identifying traffic types to highlight potential issues. These alerts now enable the IT team to provide management with full visibility through historical WAN utilization graphs, supporting data-driven decisions for scaling WAN links as needed.
“For example, when we experienced sluggish network performance at our headquarters, we immediately leveraged ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer to pinpoint the root cause. It turned out to be an unscheduled backup process initiated by the server team, which was consuming excessive bandwidth. By identifying the issue quickly, we were able to stop the backup process and resolve the operational disruption.“
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer was implemented by the team to their IT environment, helping them troubleshoot hurdles like high utilization, network sluggishness and pinpoint bandwidth clogs. The team now has comprehensive visibility into their network traffic, enabling them to monitor utility trends through automated daily reports, thereby supporting data driven capacity planning.
New Balance's yearly WAN budget planning is done with the help of NetFlow Analyzer, after utilization across regions are reviewed to identify where WAN upgrades are necessary to meet the business needs. During outages that are often caused due to ISP issues, NFA helps trace root causes and optimize bandwidth, ensuring optimal network performance.
NetFlow Analyzer has greatly enhanced New Balance's network management with a wide range of powerful features, providing crucial insights and control over their IT infrastructure. Some of the functionalities that are most loved by the company's IT team include:
This feature-rich characteristic of NetFlow Analyzer helps New Balance maintain robust, efficient and adaptable network operations.
Implementing NetFlow Analyzer has generated a significant return on Investment for New Balance, reducing costs.
With improved visibility and proactive monitoring of network traffic, the company saves around $150,000 on downtime costs by preventing operational issues and network slowdowns. By minimizing downtime, NFA ensures smooth business critical operations, enhancing customer experience.
NetFlow Analyzer empowers the IT team with comprehensive traffic insights and detailed utilization tracking, enabling them to make informed, data-driven decisions about planning their utilization and capacity (capacity planning). This proactive approach reduced the need for unnecessary hardware investments and optimized the network for peak efficiency. As a result, New Balance's IT team can now ensure that their infrastructure remains aligned with their demanding business needs while also lowering excessive service provider fees.
Additionally, NFA has reduced the need for additional hardware by optimizing current infrastructure, saving New Balance an estimated $200,000 annually.
The agent-less design and ease of deployment also reduce the workload on IT staff, leading to an estimated savings of $20,000 annually on maintenance costs. Bottom-line, with a high ROI of 370,000 USD a year, NetFlow Analyzer has proven to be a valuable asset to New Balance.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is a full-featured bandwidth monitoring and network traffic analysis solution. It caters to organizations of all sizes, monitoring their networks to provide end-to-end visibility into network traffic, application performance, and every interface and device, including routers, switches, and firewalls, with multi-vendor support. With NetFlow Analyzer, navigate the causes of failures; identify bottlenecks; detect network security threats; and manage and track all network traffic activity, top talkers, and conversations with an overview of your entire distributed network from a single, central installation. For more information about NetFlow Analyzer, visit manageengine.com/netflow.