Marge Carson - 90-user manufacturing client (2007 - 2020)
The client’s story
In 2007, this manufacturing client outsourced their IT department to us. From that point until now, we’ve been managing their system. When we took over, their system was a complete mess. Over the years, we’ve been able to slowly eliminate problems one by one. Today, their system is stable and only requires routine upgrades and some maintenance work. One of the critical items we were able to successfully fix was related to their manufacturing applications. This is described below.
Case Study - Application crashes
Problem
This client uses a set of manufacturing applications to manage the production process of their products. They use these applications in all 4 of their locations in Los Angeles, North Carolina, Mexico and Asia. The manufacturing applications were problematic at best. Users were constantly getting interrupted with application crashes and/or network disconnections. Local users kept experiencing application crashes while remote users had to deal with both application crashes and being disconnected from the remote access server. These interruptions negatively impacted the users’ experience and the client’s business operations.
Solution
The application crashes and the remote access disconnections both had many contributing factors. Each factor required its own separate fix. The solution to the application crashes required very specific changes to the application server, changes to the network settings on all servers and PCs, and the implementation of a faster network. The solution to the remote access disconnections required changes to the Internet connections at both the headquarter and remote locations as well as changes to the remote users’ PCs.
Result
Once we implemented all of the required changes, users reported the programs only crashed once every few months and the remote access disconnections became a limited occurrence.
