Fitnetworks Case Studies

Manufacturing: FitNetworks’ Holistic Approach Uncovers Years of Neglect & Price Gouging

FitNetworks is the national Managed Service Provider of choice for manufacturers and the construction industry. We take a holistic approach to IT management which provides valuable insight into current technical operations, existing contracts and vendor relationships. FitNetworks operates as its client’s CTO and IT Director as well as manages the daily technical operations.

Brian Sullivan, founder and CEO of FitNetworks, leads his team in identifying areas of neglect, nagging issues and poor design / implementation. Additionally, the FitNetworks team gets to the bottom of all IT related contracts and finds out-of-balance relationships.

Challenge

One FitNetworks client with locations from California to Toronto Canada, was suffering daily from a partially implemented network. Servers, switches, routers and circuits were purchased and setup with initial configurations but never fully configured and deployed. This greatly affected operations and efficiency at the user level. The same client was dealing with multiple issues: very slow and overpriced Internet at their main location, one “Enterprise Partner” acting as a high margin middle-man for datacenter hosting, an antiquated unsecure method of remote access, and a second “Enterprise Partner” much too large to continue supporting an outdated SAP implementation for this midsized business.

Solution

FitNetworks first order of business was to approach each of these challenges deliberately and strategically starting with the issue with the greatest impact on the company.

Complete partially implemented network deployment. Most FitNetworks’ clients are geographically removed from FitNetworks headquarters in North Carolina. In this specific case, the client’s main location is in California. Network discovery and on-boarding procedures were finalized remotely with a carefully crafted plan to spend 3 days at the client’s facility. Upon arrival, FitNetworks successfully executed the plan to fully implement important network functionality resulting in streamlined efficiency at the user level.
Overcoming slow and the overpriced Internet was quite a challenge for this chemical manufacturer as the problem was much deeper than a contract issue. The existing fiber internet circuit was terminated in the chemical plant and partially ran underground through chemical contamination. Coordinating with multiple carriers, service providers, safety departments and plan entrance for new above ground fiber and termination at the main office location took months of determination and deliberate effort. Now that the project is complete the client enjoys ten times the Internet bandwidth at a fraction of the cost and can rest assured the data circuit is not subject to chemical corrosion.
Cutting out the “Enterprise” middle-man is not as easy as might be imagined. The challenge presents itself in both the contractual and practical details. Specifically, service providers are barred from contracting directly with the client and migrating an entire datacenter, which can be time consuming and complicated. In this specific case a good portion of the customer’s active directory network as well as multiple SAP servers needed to be both upgraded and migrated in a very specific window of time. Detailed planning and coordinating with this internationally dispersed company paid off in the end. Not only did FitNetworks consolidate resources needed, upgrade and migrate servers, we helped cut monthly hosting expenses by almost 2/3rds.
Retiring an antiquated and unsecure remote access tool meant reeducating this diverse group of users to use newly implemented technology. FitNetworks often becomes involved in shaping company policies and procedures as they relate to IT. Encryption technology, strong password policies, multi-factor authentication, updates and more are all a part of the solutions FitNetworks brings to its clients. Prior to these changes this client’s data was in an especially vulnerable state.
Dealing with too large of an “Enterprise Partner” can yield lack of response and attention. This is exactly the case with this mid-sized chemical company and the organization that provided both SAP Basis and Functional support. FitNetworks crafted a solution to not only save its client tens of thousands of dollars, but to ensure its need would be met on an ongoing basis.

Results

Now instead of neglected IT services and overpriced Enterprise solutions, FitNetworks’ client has
Improved overall network operations, increased performance, executed a datacenter migration that yielded both cost savings and operating system upgrades, heightened security and implemented a better SAP Support contract that has dramatically improved IT operations.

The Bottom Line

This manufacturing client has found a Managed Service Provider of choice (FitNetworks) that fits the manufacturing Industry like no other. FitNetworks is the perfect fit because of…