Acknowledge and Veeam work together so Dorel Juvenile can continue to ensure safety for children

With Acknowledge's Veeam solution, Dorel Juvinele is assured of continuous data availability, allowing the organization to continue to grow optimally.

Dorel Juvenile is the largest company in the juvenile products industry, with operations in more than 100 countries. Dorel’s mission is to design, develop, and deliver products that enrich lives. To achieve its mission, Dorel relies on up-to-date, secure, and highly available data across the entire organization. As the global leader in intelligent data management, Veeam offers a platform for organizations that want to automate data management with the assurance of always having the most recent data available. Acknowledge demonstrated the capabilities of the Veeam Availability Suite during a pilot project at Dorel’s data center in Paris.

The importance of data

Dorel Juvenile develops well-known brands such as Maxi-Cosi, Tiny Love, Cosco, BéBé Confort and Infanti. The organization employs 7,000 professionals in 25 countries. Under the motto "Care for valuable life," they help families live carefree lives with products that score highest in customer reviews. Dorel has gained a reputation for its respected brands and they are keen on complying with safety legislation in the market. They dedicate themselves to developing innovative quality products, such as car seats, strollers and baby monitors. Each product excels in safety, design and usability, so parents have nothing to worry about. The design, development and testing of Dorel's products all takes place in-house. So data is very important to the entire operation. If data is not available, the company cannot keep its standard of quality high, putting children's safety at risk.

Communication with customers

In addition to creating products that earn top ratings from customers, Dorel also maintains a strong digital connection with them. By engaging with families and retailers around the world, Dorel gathers the insights needed to innovate and continuously improve. Data is essential to this process as well.“Data availability is crucial to ourbusiness operations,” says Stephan Hendriks, Information and Digital Director at Dorel Juvenile. “We cannot afford prolonged downtime, as this would seriously threaten our business. We need 24/7 data for our production and logistics processes and to communicate with our customers through digital channels. We must be flexible and agile.”

Fast, reliable and flexible

The existing solution no longer met the high requirements, which put data integrity at risk. Tom Beekmans, technical engineer at Dorel: “It was clear that our existing solution had reached end-of-life and that we needed a new one. It had to meet three key requirements: easy implementation, ease of use, and independence from the hardware used. We wanted more flexibility for our management, to enhance our capabilities, and to integrate hardware.” As Dorel’s IT, Acknowledge played a key role in the transition to the Veeam Availability Suite. “Veeam is very user-friendly and intuitive, which means it can be rolled out in just a few minutes,” says Tom.“Disaster recovery is high on our agenda. Instant VM Recovery supports this efficiently. We went live with Veeam in the first quarter of 2018, and the solution has proven to be very stable so far.”

Backup as insurance

Like many other companies, Dorel is experiencing significant data growth, especially for research and product development. “Ultimately, backup is a form of insurance you need,” says Tom. “Thanks to this new platform, we’re assured of availability and integrity for about 1,200 users. The biggest advantages are ease of use, low costs, simple management, and maximum flexibility. Veeam is very user-friendly, which means we’re less dependent on the expertise of in-house specialists. With our previous solution, I’d regularly get calls whenever a change needed to be implemented or a recovery had taken place. Since this is now much easier, more colleagues are able to perform these tasks themselves, which saves a lot of valuable time.”

Customer engagement

With the Veeam platform, the organization is assured of unlimited availability of reliable operational data, which supports quality in design, development and production of products. Dorel also saves thousands of dollars in consulting and maintenance costs thanks to easy deployment and management. Digital marketing channels are protected against data loss, optimizing customer engagement throughout the product journey. With Veeam, Acknowledge provides a flexible channel for Dorel to gather more information about customer feedback. This gives customers a real seat at the table at Dorel.