Dalechek Tech Talk

IVP Plastics Rallies After Disaster Thanks to Microsoft Office 365

November 8, 2018, Written by 0 comment
Dalechek Tech Talk

Dalechek Case Study Thumbnail-IVP PlasticsOne of the Midwest’s homegrown, American-based successful manufacturers of plastics experienced a major disaster earlier this year. It was one of the most disruptive challenges the team had ever faced: The entire roof of their Washington, IL, manufacturing facility collapsed under the pressure of snow and ice, impacting all facets of their ever-growing business. It left IVP Plastics with no electric, a hazardous environment, servers underwater, and most significantly, manufacturing and production at a complete standstill.

Luckily, IVP Plastics had recently engaged Dalechek Technology Group (DTG) as a trusted advisor and information technology solutions partner to help them create a stronger IT strategy and upgrade their older equipment. DTG developed a strategic roadmap for IVP Plastics using technologies, including Microsoft Office 365, which helped soften the blow of disruption.

So what does a customer do in this situation when their entire revenue relies on being able to run their plastics production facilities? They turn to their IT solutions partner for help.

“First and foremost, we treated the disaster as if it were our own company by getting boots on the ground in Washington, IL, after receiving the Saturday afternoon call from Tom Williams, who leads production for IVP,” said Rick Dalechek, CEO of Dalechek Technology Group.

The DTG team had just designed and implemented a project moving IVP Plastics email servers off premise into Microsoft datacenters cloud-computing arena, Office 365. This meant their email was still alive and running.

It was a familiar challenge for Dalechek Technology Group. “We pride ourselves on being problem solvers, which is just one reason customers trust in the DTG team to step up and deliver highly scalable computing resources to get and keep services and production online,” said Rick.

How DTG Solved the Challenge

DTG dispatched a technician to the IVP Plastics, St. Louis, MO, site to set up a temporary virtual host used to restore the Washington, IL, domain controller and other business-critical servers, which allowed users to access all of their crucial business information.

Once it was safe to enter the primary building, the DTG technician assessed the onsite damage. With the roof collapsing, IVP Plastics had no electricity to any of their business, and their main office was flooded, which damaged their backup battery, storage unit and the server hosting the virtual machines.

The humidity level was extremely high due to the flooding; so dehumidifiers were purchased to prevent damage to the remaining equipment. The Dalechek team stayed onsite for five days to assess the overall damage and formulate an ongoing plan.

Thankfully, the client had a second location, less than a mile from the main office, which could serve as a potential backup office. DTG performed a site assessment to determine feasibility, and a temporary move plan was put in motion.

The Plan in Action

With a spider web of business systems and access levels to work through, DTG technicians ate this elephant one BYTE at a time. (A little IT humor. ?) It was necessary to first move the equipment to keep it safe, while simultaneously spinning up an off-site backup to restore network connectivity to the internet – working with local ISP Services. This at least allowed IVP Plastics employees to log in to their laptops and connect to their email, while DTG worked on getting their most business-critical services moved back into production.

Listening and understanding the client’s game plan for getting production up and running was critical that first week to enable DTG to make recommendations and strategize with leadership on the best information technology plan.

The Result

Over the next three months, the DTG team was in constant contact and onsite to elevate any pain points that may prevent the business from getting back on its feet and fully functioning from an information technology perspective. The off-site back-ups, email and hands-on expertise by the Dalechek team helped IVP Plastics successfully recover from a near-disaster.

Additionally, they now have new servers, new drivers and a new smart battery, which means things can be safely brought down and increases their storage by four times. They also now have better Wi-Fi and are cloud-ready with a dedicated onsite backup server that can connect to the cloud and provide off-site backups. This enables them to be more redundant and scalable. And in the near future, Dalechek hopes to help IVP Plastics build out a new server room with separate powering and cooling, which will help prevent the level of damage from any future disaster.

“The entire management staff at IVP appreciates the team effort put forward by Dalechek these past few weeks,” said John Bernius, CFO of IVP Plastics. “We take comfort in knowing we have an IT partner who is dependable, trustworthy, knowledgeable and willing to exhaust resources, to ensure our IT infrastructure is top-notch and reliable.”

Interested in understanding how services like these could benefit your business? Reach out to Dalechek today to learn more.

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