VF Corporation (NYSE: VFC), the world's largest apparel company, has invested in a new tool to provide real-time analysis of over 100 of the most critical problems affecting availability of its global IT infrastructure. This infrastructure currently supports the company's manufacturing facilities and distribution centers throughout North America, Latin America and Asia, as well as internal business-critical processes including customer services, finance and sales administration. The InCharge applications from System Management ARTS (SMARTS) will help the company to detect root-cause problems before a failure can impact business-critical services. In addition, InCharge can eliminate the slow, inefficient and time-consuming manual troubleshooting process.A key consideration for VF Corporation in selecting SMARTS InCharge was the fact that it diagnoses key infrastructure problems in real-time, out-of-the-box; it requires virtually no startup effort or ongoing maintenance; and it integrates easily into the company's existing management environment. "We tested numerous network management solutions before selecting InCharge," said Shyamol Mehta, network services manager for VF Corporation. "The factors propelling InCharge ahead of the competition for us were its rich functionality, combined with its ability to manage a very complex network and its seamless integration with our existing management tools, including IBM NetView and Tivoli TEC." Mehta added: "In an average day, our operational staff is tracking as many as a hundred events. With InCharge providing the root cause analysis we need, we believe we can achieve an 80 per cent reduction in the number of events we need to act on, which will greatly improve our overall efficiency and enable us to be much more proactive."