IT Strategic Plan and Implementation for a National Construction Company
Business Problem:
A national construction company with its corporate headquarters based in the Philadelphia region has been in business as a national utility contractor for thirty years, specializing in the telephone, gas, electrical, and water industries. They have offices located in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and Florida.
The firm is comprised of three disparate divisions: Construction, Engineering and Equipment Rentals. Each division and each office operates as its own profit center and functions as a standalone IT environment. The construction company operates its accounting system on a legacy IBM System 36 platform, the rentals company utilizes a custom solution running on an AS400 and the engineering firm has a client/server-based CAD system. Although local area network infrastructure is present in some locations for file and print services, corporate communications have been provided through traditional means of the phone and postal services. As a result, the organizations were experiencing problems and delays collaborating on projects, processing accounting data, increasing overhead costs, reducing productivity and delaying revenues. A need also existed to migrate to a new client/server-based accounting system for the construction company as a result of the legacy system no longer being supported by the current vendor.
In an effort to maintain its competitive edge in the industry, the corporation undertook the endeavor to build a new corporate headquarters with a desire to centralize and improve the IT operations and infrastructure utilizing new and improved technologies.
The corporation’s desire was to implement a centralized, manageable infrastructure with the following characteristics:
- Implementation of a wide area network to provide communications between offices and systems.
- Improve communications between the offices and divisions through the implementation of a unified messaging system including a groupware solution to handle e-mail, fax and voice mail.
- Implement a corporate local area network to support the new accounting system for the construction company as well as the additional IT initiatives.
- Provide remote access through the use of VPN and dial-up connectivity.
- Implement an enterprise wide back-up and disaster recovery solution.
- Implement enhanced and improved Internet access.
- Develop a means of tracking and managing corporate IT assets.
- Develop a strategy for the move of the corporate headquarters to the new facility including a new network backbone.
Solution:
RESolutions Consulting designed and implemented a strategic IT Plan that met the business requirements of each division of the company and centralized the IT infrastructure. Features of the solution included:
- A Cisco based Wide Area Network utilizing VPN tunneling over the Internet for system-to-system communications.
- Implementation of Lotus Notes as a Groupware solution to provide the backbone for unified messaging of fax, voice and e-mail using CallXPress.
- Implementation of a Windows 2000 LAN in the corporate office utilizing Active Directory Services for authentication of the enterprise network infrastructure.
- Implementation of a remote access strategy utilizing both toll free dial-up and VPN solutions.
- Implementation of Tivoli Storage Manager to provide a centralized enterprise back-up solution.
- Procurement of a national based ISP to provide full T-1 (1.54Mbps) connectivity to the Internet from each division location.
- Implementation of Tangram Asset Insight to provide IT asset tracking services.
- Implementation of a Cisco multi-GB Ethernet switch for corporate local network communications over a fiber backbone.
- Provision of a move strategy for the corporate headquarters minimizing effect on business productivity.
Return on Investment (ROI):
The following ROI was achieved by the construction company:
- Communications and productivity levels were dramatically improved due to WAN connectivity, greatly impacting the firm’s ability to manage and collaborate on business initiatives.
- Reduced postage and phone communication costs due to the implementation of the unified messaging solution.
- Implementation of scalable solutions increases the lifespan of the equipment and the new LAN ensures data integrity, security and accessibility, utilizing its investment in infrastructure in a proactively-driven paradigm instead of expensively correcting issues in a reactive mode.
- Reduced costs for Internet connectivity and remote access to network resources through the use of localized Internet points of presence.
- Tracking IT assets allows better management of resources and reduces the cost of replacing equipment in a reactive mode.
