TEAM Industries  

Overview of Solution

"What we have right now is we have five different locations in TEAM Industries within Minnesota, and then we have one in North Carolina—so we have that geography difference again.

We have our engineers at one location; we have—in fact, every plant is kind of—it's standalone, but yet we communicate a lot with each other, we work with each other. One location provides parts to another location, so there's a lot of activity between the plants.

We actually utilized Qwest to get an iQ networking enhanced port solution. With that, we also got the Adtrans, then NetAdvanta 3400 series. And I think those two combined provided us the firewall that we needed; it also gave us the ability to have Internet out of each location.

With having Internet out of each location, we also had to come up with a solution to manage the content that was getting filtered on the Internet, and in the past, being that we were going through a central location, we had one product that did that—we didn't have that anymore, so that's where the managed security services actually came into play.

We were able to use the managed security services to not only do our content filtering; it also had another layer of firewall for us, and for those we actually used the Juniper SSG 20s.

And I think basically right now the way that's all working is every plant can stay standard; we can—we apply a policy change not just on one device, we apply it to all devices. We stay very standard across TEAM Industries, and we're able to do that; we submit one ticket in Q.Control and we change all devices at one time. "

Non-financial Benefits

"Some of the non-financial benefits that we saw going to the iQ networking enhanced port—so basically instead of a hub-and spoke topology, we're going to a meshed topology—we were able to mitigate the risk of downtime; we were able to see better flow of data in our network going from one site to another site instead of having to go through a central location anymore.

We were also able to see some benefits as far as content filtering. In the past, using the SurfControl that we had, we actually always had some sites sneak by—such as streaming media. You know, you could block, you know, 80 percent of the streaming media, but there's always those sites that get by and those are the ones that kind of kill your bandwidth.

So by going to the [Qwest] managed services, what we've noticed is that that's few and far between; in fact, in most cases it's—we never have to worry about it anymore. It's blocked, and I think that's made a huge difference in our bandwidth. Instead of using up, you know, three-fourths of our T1, we're now sometimes using 20 to 30 percent of our T1 instead, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that just the filtering of the content is that much better with [Qwest's] managed services.

We're also able to not have to have a bottleneck going out to the Internet. Having all the different locations coming to one spot, you were limited by a 1.5-meg pipe for six different locations. Now having the ability to have the Internet out of each location, they have a 1.5-meg pipe to themselves between the data.

It also separates the public information from the private MPLS information, which is very important to us. So everything going down the private pipe pretty much stays private and everything in the public kind of, you know, goes down a separate path—so just that separation of the data was very nice to have right out of the gate—right out of each location. "

Measurable Benefits

"Some of the measurable benefits that we've seen by going to this solution is with the iQ networking enhance port solution of it, we actually were able to decrease our monthly costs by right around 15 to 20 percent; combine that with the managed security services and we're looking at closer to 20 to 25 percent decrease in monthly costs.

Part of that has to do with the ability to avoid some licensing costs we might have had down in the past. You know, two years from now we're seeing those savings saying 'I don't have to renew this product anymore.'

It's also the avoidance of just having DSL lines at every single location; we can now utilize the VLANs and still get the benefit of having, you know, somebody go out of the door in our network but not necessarily have to pay the, you know, 40 or 50 dollar charge to get the DSL line in.

We also did see quite a bit of improvement on our Internet speeds. So before we were talking about maybe at most 800K, you know, as far as the speed of our Internet at the majority of our locations. Right now, it never goes below 1 meg. So you know, just the consistency of the bandwidth that we have on the Internet and the amount has had great impact on our performance gains.

When you're talking about, you know, e-mails and supplier portals and customer portals and those demanding business applications on the Internet, you know, when you have slow speeds, it's a big impact on end users. They really want to see those high speeds on the Internet right now and I think we're able to give that to them switching to this solution.

So going to the MPLS gave us the ability to more cost effectively increase the bandwidth at each location, so I think that was a huge factor, too, was just the ability to grow and to expand step by step. We don't have to do a huge, you know, T1; we can maybe say we want a, you know, a little bit over here and a little bit over here. So I think that was a big thing for us, too.

Another one of the measurable benefits that we have is we anticipate probably a decrease of maybe 10 to 15 percent of our staff's time in actually analyzing these reports and seeing what's going on on our network and troubleshooting.

Right now, we're spending maybe a little bit more time on the reporting piece and troubleshooting, but I think that's in an effort to be a little more proactive instead of reactive. The hope is down the road—you know, six months down the road we don't have to be reactive; we can be proactive with monitoring [the network] and the notifications and the alerts that come through with Q.Control and just having the ability to see what's going on. "