Structure IT department

Business Process Improvement

Business Process Analysis

Processes and workflows need to be reviewed regularly as business conditions are in constant evolution. Our analyst team builds the bridge between the development team and the business process owners:

Investigating the business requirements and translating them into UML-based flows in Enterprise Architect.
Communicating continuously to business and development making sure that both speak the same language.
Following up development, guaranteeing the initial requirements are met.

The same team is at the forefront when it comes to the integration of the multiple company acquisitions into our IT landscape. Projects are being carried out on all continents.

Project Management

Complex projects are being elaborated in parallel with still a limited workforce. Project Managers at TVH focus on resource planning besides scope control and making sure the project is respecting its timeline. They work in Jira in a flexible manner using amongst others Scrum and Kanban.
As a hands-on business we highly appreciate the functional involvement of our Project Managers on top of their methodological guidance.

IT Execution

Support

4400 colleagues in 45 countries work on our platform. The support team provides a user-friendly helpdesk for all these colleagues, and handles approximately 1000 service requests a month.
In addition to the everyday assistance for 1500 workstations, peripherals and the accompanying software, they also support the full range of mobile devices.
In short, a flexible team which is always on stand-by, helping out colleagues all over the world.

System administration

TVH is growing at a rapid pace, the challenge for our system administrators is to provide a flexible but stable environment. They operate a network of 190 components, 50 physical servers, 250 virtual servers and 2000 cisco phones. These specialists are able to quickly and correctly diagnose problems, such as service outages, and prevent these from happening. Last year TVH achieved an uptime of 99,92%.

R&D

Inspired by “To stand still is to fall behind”, the R&D department takes on the challenge to give TVH a technological edge in the rapidly changing IT landscape.

Its goals are to closely follow innovations in different IT domains such as Infrastructure, Development Methodologies and Technologies. By taking advantage of state-of-the-art technologies, roadmaps are defined for practical applications within day-to-day development and operations.

Quality

In a continuous integration platform as ours, quality is key in ensuring a high-performant and stable runtime environment. It’s an ongoing challenge to make sure both functional and technical requirements are achieved without impacting performance and stability of our 7 million lines of code.
Our quality team promotes a culture of quality consciousness by proactive monitoring of system performance, supporting developers and improving general IT knowledge.

Information Management

Business intelligence (BI)

Our day-to-day business is driven by data. Turning the data into high-quality information is key to our operational, tactical and strategic decision process. To support decision-making, various data sources are stored in our data warehouse. Visualising that information through QlikView, Salesforce or any other tool gives an insight into the health of the departments and supports our business decision. Since years, focus is on self-service BI so that business is owner of their story telling. At this point we have about 105 interactive QlikView reports covering all domains.

Technical Information

In addition to the vast range of spare parts, the enormous technical knowledge is also a key differentiating factor of the TVH customer proposition. Supporting the customer in his search for the correct part and giving the right information on how to install it, takes the customers’ experience to the next level. This process is supported by a Product Information Management system containing 21 million references, each of them with a vast amount of data on the reference itself and its functioning within the different types of equipment.

Big data and IoT

In today’s digital economy it is all about turning data into information. Both in IoT and Big data TVH is building an infrastructure to capture and process enormous amounts of data. Big data, IoT and Predictive Analytics offer a huge potential in increasing the customer experience.

Software Development

Mobile/Web Applications

Also for the internet area TVH has chosen for in-house development.

- All web applications are built using the myStrobe framework which is a collaboration of Quarix for the back-end (progress) and Wicket for the front-end (Java.
- Our mobile applications, such as the mobile webshop, make it easier for customers to use the power of their smartphones in the JIT strategy.
- Our websites are Drupal based and require customisations to meet the TVH needs.

ERP Development

The in-house-built ERP solution is being developed using the Openedge Progress programming environment (www.progress.com). The team’s main role is to provide TVH with a tailormade, agile and stable solution by applying a continuous integration development cycle. The source base consists of more than 7 million lines of code in around 13 000 files.

The developers are divided into subteams which each specialise in a part of the supply chain. Besides writing code, our developers are also responsible for technical analysis.