Outsourcing of IT services at Senco Příbram
The intention of the management, in agreement with the local administrator, was to solve the unsatisfactory situation. There were two options – reinforcement with the help of another employee, or using the services of a company that takes care of IT professionally.
Original state
IT at the customer was solved by own resources. PC, servers and networks were managed by one employee who learned everything on the go. He managed about 50 computers, mostly built from purchased components, and one custom-assembled server. Most of the time was spent building new computers and maintaining existing ones, there was no time left for any development, which was quite negatively perceived by the company’s management. Due to the nature of the company’s business – the production of modern computer-controlled switchboards – the need to strengthen IT became more and more apparent. Since the IT administrator was alone, there was no substitutability, no response times or time to resolve a problem (SLA), and user requests were not recorded. He had to learn the whole IT issue from the administration of end stations, peripherals to servers himself, which created room for a number of errors. The last thing that clearly showed the need for change was data loss caused by the ignorance of the administrator combined with a poorly set warranty on the main server.
Intent
The intention of the management, in agreement with the local administrator, was to solve the unsatisfactory situation. There were two options – reinforcement with the help of another employee, or using the services of a company that takes care of IT professionally. The primary goal was to hand over the management of the server solution, where the knowledge and experience of a team of IT experts is best used, to the supplier company and then, if the selected company proves successful, to entrust it with the management and development of the entire IT.
Implementation
We took over the server management at the beginning of 2013 and immediately started consolidating the server environment. We deployed service monitoring and gradually fixed unsatisfactory solutions based on Microsoft Active Directory, incorrectly set DNS and DHCP to Microsoft Exchange and Fileshare. We also focused on security, deploying a new firewall and antivirus system. We also solved backups that were hardly addressed at all.
Due to the great satisfaction of the company’s management, we took over the entire IT portfolio from October 2013 and we began to address issues with end users, while the current IT administrator moved to another position.
As part of management, we began to rotate and standardize all computing resources, which led to reduced IT management costs and accelerated SLAs.
State of play
Currently, the company has about 12 servers deployed in the HA environment and in the new server room, backup is solved, including backups to a remote location in case of total disaster. We manage about 160 end devices that are under warranty and regularly replaced, we have deployed printing solutions, we have expanded the networks to the production premises for the needs of the Production 4.0 project, and last year we also exchanged analog telephones for IP telephony.
Benefits for the company
The biggest benefit for the customer is the fact that he does not have to focus on IT and can focus on his primary business. An internal IT department has been established, which is in charge of programming its own products (switchboards) and the company management appreciates that specialists do not have to deal with standard IT needs.