Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Food Manufacturer Improves Customer Service and Reduces Operating Costs
Overview
Country:United States
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Ubiquity Brands is a food manufacturing holding company with 800 employees. Based in Chicago, Illinois, it owns companies that specialize in salty snack foods, such as Fiddle Faddle® and Jays Potato Chips.
Business Situation
With each new acquisition, Ubiquity Brands inherited a new set of IT problems that made effective communication and collaboration among all of its subsidiaries nearly impossible.
Solution
Ubiquity Brands standardized on the Microsoft platform and worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partners BDO Seidman and Peters & Associates to create a secure, reliable, and scalable corporate network.
Benefits
Reduced annual operating costs
Recovered 30 percent of IT staff time
Increased collaboration and manageability
Improved customer service
Increased security and scalability / “The new infrastructure has enabled IT generalists at Ubiquity Brands to recover about 30 percent of their time.”
William Schumacher, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Ubiquity Brands
Ubiquity Brands is a successful food manufacturing holding company, but its outdated IT infrastructure could not keep pace with its rapid growth. Ubiquity Brands had no effective to way communicate or share data with its subsidiaries, and the IT staff was so busy reacting to end-user complaints that they had little time to support the company’s business goals. To address these problems and position the company for future growth, Ubiquity Brands designed a new corporate IT infrastructure that includes Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition. This new IT solution gives Ubiquity Brands dependable communication, improved manageability, increased scalability and security, and the ability to improve customer service while reducing annual operating costs.
Situation
Founded in 2004, Ubiquity Brands is a food manufacturing holding company that is quickly establishing a national presence in the competitive market for salty snack foods. Ubiquity Brands operates by acquiring companies with national or regional brands and significant growth potential that can expand its distribution capabilities, create co-marketing opportunities for its other products, and contribute to its overall success.
The first company Ubiquity Brands acquired was the Lincoln Snacks Company, which manufactures a line of popular premium caramelized popcorn and nut snacks that includes brands such as Poppycock®, Fiddle Faddle®, and Just The Nuts®. Ubiquity Brands’ second acquisition was Jays Foods Inc., a Chicago-based family-run business that has been one of the Midwest’s leading snack food companies since the 1920s. Lincoln Snacks distributes its products through warehouse direct with major retailers, while Jays uses a fleet of trucks to distribute its snacks to regional grocery chains in addition to smaller retail stores across multiple business channels. By sending its products through both distribution channels, Ubiquity Brands can expand the market for all of its brands.
For its business model to succeed, Ubiquity Brands must have an IT infrastructure at its headquarters and in each of its operating companies that enables in-depth communication and collaboration throughout its organization.
“Every time we acquire a new company, our initial goal is to provide the technology it needs to operate independently for a year or two as we get the rest of the business in shape,” says William Schumacher, who serves as both Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer for Ubiquity Brands. “We must be able to access the information we need to evaluate the company’s performance, decide which products to improve or introduce, and develop new marketing and distribution strategies.”
That’s how it works today, but in the beginning Ubiquity Brands was just four employees communicating over POP3 e-mail accounts. When Ubiquity Brands acquired Lincoln Snacks and Jays Foods, both companies were relying on badly outdated hardware and software. It had been nearly a decade since either company had made proactive IT investments to improve business performance.
“Both organizations were healthy in terms of their products and brands, but they had not been able to invest in technology that could have transformed their data into business intelligence and enabled them to make more informed decisions,” Schumacher says. “They were getting along with the IT equivalent of Band-Aids®.”
As a result, Ubiquity Brands and its operating companies had no effective way to communicate or to share data, and the lack of centralized IT management and operations kept the limited IT staff busy handling end-user complaints instead of developing strategies to help the business grow.
Solution
To solve its immediate IT problems and position the company for growth, Ubiquity Brands turned to two Microsoft Gold Certified Partners, BDO Seidman and Peters & Associates, and asked them to set up a corporate IT environment that would support its current and future business needs. BDO Seidman, which has an ongoing business advisory relationship with Ubiquity Brands, brought in Peters & Associates to design the new infrastructure.
Standardizing the Platform
The solution started at Ubiquity Brands headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, where the consultants laid out and followed a comprehensive infrastructure, operations, and risk plan. To ensure a scalable, reliable, and secure corporate network with enhanced support for user mobility, the consultants installed:
- Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, with the Active Directory® service and Terminal Services.
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communication and collaboration server, part of Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client to provide robust e-mail and messaging services with features such as group calendaring and contacts management.
- Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, part of Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software, to aggregate data among operating companies and to generate business intelligence for analysis and strategic planning.
- Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 Workgroup Edition, part of Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software, to manage servers and PCs remotely, anticipate and identify network problems, and resolve them quickly.
“The executive team members at Ubiquity Brands had worked at major food industry companies such as Pepsico, Select Beverages, the Nutrasweet Company, Proctor & Gamble, Frito Lay, and Tropicana, so they already understood the value of the Microsoft platform,” says Richard Opal, Vice President at Peters & Associates, which was named 2005 Microsoft National Partner of the Year. “As soon as they saw the cost-effective solutions Microsoft is offering to mid-sized companies, they knew that was what they wanted.”
Once the headquarters IT infrastructure was in place, the consultants evaluated the IT systems at the two operating companies to determine how to align them with the new Ubiquity Brands infrastructure. What they found was a diverse mix of antiquated software that needed to be replaced or upgraded, including Novell GroupWise and NetWare, IBM Lotus software, Microsoft Windows NT® Server version 4.0 operating system, and many different desktop computer operating systems, some as old as Microsoft Windows® 95. In addition, neither Lincoln nor Jays was using any consistent standards, processes or best practices, which increased support costs even more.
“It was like finding an IT infrastructure that hadn’t been touched in eight or ten years,” Opal says. “Before Ubiquity Brands could reach into the operating companies and do the kind of analysis and collaboration necessary to build those businesses, we had to clean up the IT mess. The people at Ubiquity Brands were hindered in their ability to do their work, because every IT system was so completely different and had not been maintained.”
Integrating the Operating Companies
At Lincoln and Jays, the consultants installed much of the same software Ubiquity Brands was using at its headquarters, upgrading from Windows NT Server 4.0 to Windows Server 2003, for example, and replacing Novell GroupWise and NetWare with Exchange Server 2003. In addition, the 175 desktop and portable computers in the Ubiquity Brands organization now run either the Windows 2000 or Windows XP operating system, and Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition.
In designing the new IT system for Ubiquity Brands, the consultants took three other important steps to support and help facilitate the company’s business activities. First, they set up a modified data center model with multiple copies of each server, which makes possible a shared services model. As the business evolves, having the data center enables Ubiquity Brands to decide what services it wants to provide to each operating company and how many it wants to leave in each subsidiary. Second, the consultants reconfigured the 14 HP servers at Ubiquity Brands, Lincoln Snacks, and Jays Foods to ensure the network would be fault tolerant, an assurance none of the companies had previously. Finally, they designed the IT infrastructure to be modular, which makes it easy for Ubiquity Brands to scale up and add new companies as they are acquired, keep them integrated for as long as necessary, and break them off easily at any time if the best business strategy is to spin them off or sell them.
Benefits
By standardizing on the Microsoft platform to create its corporate network, Ubiquity Brands increased collaboration and manageability, reduced operating costs, increased scalability and security, and improved customer service.
Reduced Operating Costs
Having a common IT platform with increased manageability enables Ubiquity Brands to lower operational costs by adopting a shared services model for its business and reducing overall headcount as new companies are acquired. Ubiquity Brands can offer its operating companies centralized services, such as accounting, human resources, messaging collaboration, business intelligence, call centers, and customer support, relieving them of the burden of paying for those services individually and reducing Ubiquity Brands' overall operating costs. Sharing services also makes it possible for Ubiquity Brands to save money by reducing the number of employees focused on providing services that are now centralized.
As a direct result of the new solution, Ubiquity Brands expects to redirect its IT staff of 2.5 positions. The focus of the limited IT staff will be directed to leveraging current business intelligence capabilities and also begin planning for an enterprise resource planning solution and implementation during the next year.”
Schumacher expects future acquisitions to bring additional savings. With the new infrastructure in place, if Ubiquity Brands acquires a company with three IT employees, for example, it is likely that only one of those employees will be needed to help support the new operating company. In addition, remaining IT staff can focus more time on work that contributes to business growth instead of reacting to IT problems and providing end-user support. “The new infrastructure has enabled IT generalists at Ubiquity Brands to recover about 30 percent of their time,” Schumacher says.
Increased Collaboration and Manageability
The new IT infrastructure has enabled a level of collaboration among Ubiquity Brands and its subsidiaries that wasn’t possible before. “The movement of what most companies would consider basic data was extremely difficult because of the lack of IT investment the subsidiaries had made over the past decade,” Opal says. “Sharing a simple Microsoft Word document was a difficult process, let alone getting access to strategic information.”
Today, Schumacher says Ubiquity Brands can easily access and analyze information about sales, inventory, and marketing strategies to determine which products are performing well and how to strengthen particular lines of business. “We can now access information from our subsidiaries and get a realistic view of our business,” Schumacher says. “And that strategic capability becomes more important with each new acquisition. Our future as a company depends on it.”
Another benefit of the new IT infrastructure is enhanced mobility for Ubiquity Brands executives and other employees who spend a lot of time on the road or working off-site and need the ability to communicate and collaborate from anywhere. With the new IT system, Ubiquity Brands employees can connect to the corporate network over a virtual private network (VPN) or by using remote procedure call (RPC) over HTTP. Not only are they able to read and respond to e-mail remotely, they can also access proprietary line-of-business applications through Terminal Services, a technology that is part of Windows Server 2003.
MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition makes it easy to manage the new Ubiquity Brands IT network from a centralized console. MOM 2005 optimizes service and server availability, and enables IT staff to monitor system performance to prevent network issues and events from going unseen and unattended. As a result, IT staff can stay on top of issues, respond quickly, and resolve most issues before they become problems.
Peters & Associates continues to help with network administration and management, and its consultants are on-site at Ubiquity Brands a few days each week, usually for scheduled maintenance. MOM 2005 alerts administrators to pending problems, and Peters schedules those tasks. If something happens that requires action before a day when Peters is scheduled to be at Ubiquity Brands, an administrator handles the problem before Ubiquity Brands even knows about it.
“Requests that aren’t critical to the business are put in a queue and dealt with routinely during one of our on-site days,” Opal says. “Everything else, we’re watching remotely on MOM.”
Improved Customer Service
According to Schumacher, the new IT infrastructure enables Ubiquity Brands to provide better customer service. The company can now connect securely and with virtually no interruption to vendors, customers, and partners, which Schumacher describes as an increasingly important requirement for doing business in the global economy.
“This Windows solution allows us to respond quickly to our customers’ needs and to focus on meeting their requirements,” he says. “We can spend time building our business instead of reacting to IT challenges.”
Increased Scalability
The modular IT infrastructure Peters & Associates designed for Ubiquity Brands makes this solution highly scalable. With any future acquisitions, Ubiquity Brands will be able to send BDO Seidman and Peters & Associates to assess the newly acquired company’s IT infrastructure and determine the best way to integrate the company into the Ubiquity Brands organization.
“With the core infrastructure in place at Ubiquity Brands, once we determine what systems we’re keeping or upgrading or discarding, the process will move very quickly,” Opal says.
Schumacher says the rapid scalability of the solution also enhances Ubiquity Brand’s ability to develop strategies for growing the new business and making it a more productive part of the company’s portfolio.
“With our new IT infrastructure, we can simply give the companies we acquire two servers, connect them to our headquarters, and they can start receiving services with no interruption in their operations,” he says. “And instead of it taking us six to nine months to understand all aspects of a new company’s business, we can access their financial systems and quickly pull the reports we need to make good decisions.”
Another benefit of this modular IT infrastructure for Ubiquity Brands is that it enables the company to scale down as easily as it scales up. If Ubiquity Brands ever decides to sell one or more of its subsidiaries, it won’t have any trouble breaking out that business without disrupting its other operations.
Increased Security
By standardizing on the Microsoft platform throughout its organization, including any additional companies it may acquire in the future, Ubiquity Brands is able to take advantage of the enhanced security features in Windows. In addition, the company now uses Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and other Microsoft services to manage security updates as well as Microsoft-recommended best practices to heighten security across its entire network.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
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