IT operations in a global premium spirits industry

Guest intro/About the Author Dan Moraru:

In my role as ICT Manager, I am responsible for IT operations, systems, application, infrastructure and service desk support at Campari America, Business Unit North America — the largest business unit of Campari Group. Campari America has employees in offices in San Francisco, Lawrenceburg distillery and bottling plants, Dallas, New York, as well as 100+ remote employees in our Sales function. We also support Campari companies in Canada and Mexico.

What is Campari?

Campari Group today is a major player in the global branded spirits industry, with a portfolio of over 50 premium and super premium brands, marketed and distributed in over 190 markets around the world, with leading positions in Europe and the Americas. The Group employs around 4,000 people and has an extensive portfolio of premium and super premium brands.

Campari America is a wholly owned subsidiary of Campari Group. At the heart of Campari America are two legends in the American spirits industry. The first, Skyy Spirits, was founded in San Francisco back in 1992 by the entrepreneur who invented iconic SKYY Vodka. The second is the world-famous Wild Turkey Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, where they have been making the world’s finest whiskies since the 1800’s.

My background in IT spans from IT support, to systems administration to IT management. I have been very fortunate to join SKYY Spirits more than 16 years ago. The company’s subsequent acquisition by Campari Group gave me the opportunity to learn new skills and grow my career. The roles I took on while at Campari America:

2. How many people did you manage at Campari America? (Main office, IT at production plants, etc.)

In my regional IT role I directly managed the U.S. team and provided direction and guidance for the team in Canada and Mexico. The U.S. team consisted of:

The team in Canada consisted of:

The team in Mexico consisted of:

3. How did you keep track of ticketing and what was your procedure to help out users?

Our ticketing system for many years was BMC Footprints. 2 years ago, Campari Group made a decision to standardize on a single ticketing system globally, to be used by all business units and IT functions like AM (application maintenance), AD (application development), Global ICT and regional Help Desk. That system is ServiceNow. It’s customizable and has a lot of capabilities. The core functionality was rolled out during the initial go-live 2 years ago, with additional functionality like Knowledge Base and automated workflows phased-in gradually every 6–12 months.

The support procedure for our employees is:

a) Open a support ticket (incident or service request) using a self-service ServiceNow portal.

b) If an issue is urgent, call IT hotline to talk to a help desk analyst on the phone.

c) All issues and resolutions must be thoroughly documented in ServiceNow.

If there is an issue that is repetitive and the solution is well known by the Help Desk team, or there is a complex issue for which a solution was found, the IT team members shall submit a request to add a solution to ServiceNow knowledge base. Knowledge base solutions are easily accessible by both IT team members and our employees.

4. What solutions do you use for onboarding and offboarding employees?

Of course we use ServiceNow system to document all the workflows related to onboarding a new hire or offboarding an employee. Our process is a bit manual and we are working with our Global IT team in charge of ServiceNow platform to automate the onboarding workflows. In general, the onboarding process looks like:

2. Document the completion of each applicable workflows, inform HR of the relevant contact info for the new hire (office extension, office phone, company mobile phone). We use a checklist to track all activities.

3. Upload the completed checklist to the ticket and close the request/ticket in ServiceNow.

5. What innovations do you see in enterprise IT that you want to implement in the future?

In my opinion, cloud technologies from Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are capable of transforming IT operations for enterprises big and small. The “cloud” has been around for quite some time but for most people meant SaaS (software as a service) applications like SalesForce CRM, etc. But now, the services offered by Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are capable of changing the architecture of how IT services are provisioned and scaled.

Automation of services and resources provisioning in the cloud, if implemented correctly, will enable IT departments to save time performing day-to-day IT operations and focus more on implementing solutions/capabilities that add value to their companies. I can’t wait to start my next project that would leverage Amazon AWS!

6. How much traveling or remote help do you use in managing the many offices/plants you have?

We do our best to provide remote support to smaller offices where there is no on-site IT staff. Once every 6–12 months myself or one of the team members will visit the remote location to ensure that all IT services are running as expected and there are no unreported problems.

7. How do you think a distributed IT labor network like Office IQ can help a enterprise company like yours?

One of the things I like about OfficeIQ is the on-demand approach to IT support. This can work well for project based needs that enterprises have or if there is a turnover in the IT department or someone simply taking a well-deserved vacation.

In the case of Campari America, it worked great for us on a project basis — closure of SF office due to HQ move to NYC. OfficeIQ provided a highly skilled IT professional, who took ownership of the “imaging” project and created a custom Dell ImageAssist image for deployment. This enabled us to image 150 laptops in SF and send them to NYC. We were quite impressed with the quality of service and knowledge from the OfficeIQ consultant and as a result hired OfficeIQ for a project in NYC.

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