TVH enhances operational efficiency and cuts costs by 10% with Elastic Observability

TVH is a global leader in the distribution of industrial parts for off-road machinery, including forklifts, agricultural equipment, and aviation components. Operating in over 170 countries with approximately 90 locations, the Belgian-headquartered company manages a complex logistics network. TVH is at the forefront of innovation, utilizing fully automated warehouses and robotics to serve customers worldwide. To maintain its competitive edge and ensure the seamless flow of goods, TVH has placed Elastic at the center of its platform engineering strategy, driving operational excellence through data-driven insights.

Observability at TVH extends far beyond traditional IT monitoring. Most of the company's operations, including shipping, logistics, and warehousing, rely on highly automated systems using robotics that generate massive volumes of log data. Previously, the organization faced challenges with data silos and a reactive approach to monitoring.

"Observability at TVH goes way beyond technical observability. We have warehouses that are fully automated with robotics, and those generate a ton of logs," says Thibaut Vandenbussche, platform manager at TVH. "One of the challenges we have is to correlate this end to end and really visualize and capture the entire supply chain."

Before standardizing on Elastic, the company relied on disparate uptime monitors that lacked cohesion. This fragmented view made it difficult to perform proper root cause analysis or predict issues before they impacted operations. To address this, TVH deployed Elastic Observability as a comprehensive platform to centralize logs, metrics, and traces, breaking down silos and enabling a unified view of its global infrastructure.

With the adoption of Elastic, TVH initiated a strategic review of its data consumption and storage policies. By analyzing how internal teams queried and stored data, the platform engineering team identified opportunities to optimize spend.

They implemented clear guidelines and policies based on data criticality, adjusting retention periods and leveraging Elastic's tiered storage architecture (hot, cold, and frozen tiers). This architectural optimization delivered immediate financial impact.

"We were able to reduce our costs by 10% just by looking at how our teams are using Elastic, how they're querying and storing their data," says Vandenbussche. "We achieved that by rearchitecting our policies, without any negative impact to the end user."

The shift to Elastic has fundamentally changed how TVH manages incidents and supports its development teams. By providing a "single pane of glass" for system performance, the organization has shortened the time required to restore services during incidents.

More importantly, Elastic has enabled a cultural shift within the IT organization. The platform team, previously a bottleneck for debugging and performance tracing, now acts as an enabler. Developers are empowered to take ownership of their services, using Elastic to dig into data, debug issues, and optimize performance independently.

"How Elastic has helped us is really to be less of a bottleneck towards other teams to help them debug or trace down performance issues," explains Vandenbussche. "Now we can really operate as a partner, to enable them to dig into it themselves and take ownership over their own platforms and services."

Looking ahead, TVH aims to deepen the adoption of observability across the business. The goal is to move beyond technical metrics and use Elastic to inform broader business decisions, ensuring that the company's digital infrastructure continues to support its rapid global growth.