Case Study / Clemmer Steelcraft Technologies
Background
Clemmer Steelcraft Technologies is a steel fabricator with a diversified product range. It is an industry leader in the manufacture of storage containments products – silos, tanks, and pressure vessels. Established in 1923 as Clemmer Industries, it was a family business which was later purchased by an employee before being sold to an auto parts manufacturer. Its present ownership took over in 1996, renamed the company Clemmer Technologies, and has since grown the business from $9 million in annual sales to ten times that. The road to growth has largely been through mergers and acquisitions. Today, Clemmer Steelcraft Technologies is based in Waterloo, Ontario, and has offices in New Brunswick and Alberta.
Challenge
In the business world, the normal cycle of IT from one generation of technology to the next can be three or four years. Companies that don’t make adequate investments in IT get left behind and expose themselves to all kinds of risks – security, data loss, system performance. This is true of many steel fabricators, a large number of which are owner-operated companies that didn’t invest in technology.
In 2005, this company acquired Steelcraft Industries, which was based in Stratford, Ontario. The move added three manufacturing plants and doubled the number of employees. The new larger organization would have eight plants in five cities. The challenge was to harmonize all the plants under the Clemmer Steelcraft umbrella into a single ERP system, bring in the email and operating systems, and retain existing corporate services in Waterloo without dropping the speed of communications. It would mean seamless integration in all the plants. Prior to the acquisition, Steelcraft had experienced system downtime of 30 percent, but the new organization would require IT running 24/7, 365 days a year. However, immediately after the acquisition, users in the Waterloo head office had to go outside the system to communicate with the new plants. There was also a problem attaching such files as engineering drawings to emails. In addition, the acquired company was using an older version of Windows that was no longer supported by Microsoft, with the result that many people were trying to break in. The potential for data loss was huge.
Clemmer Steelcraft was the first customer of Xylotek™, which was established in 2005. As Douglas Grosfield of Xylotek™ explains, only about 6 per cent of businesses have servers and systems in place that would survive a catastrophic data lost, so a lot of companies live on the edge. As often happens with Ms & As, one company’s technology is not in synch with the other, and that’s what happened here. The two systems couldn’t work together, leaving the potential for a disaster scenario, in terms of business continuity, very real.
Solution
Steelcraft, the company acquired, had its own IT system, but was weak on several fronts. Its perimeter security, such as firewalls, was poor. It had an inadequate recovery system in place, so there was a real danger for trouble if key data was lost. Its internal communications suffered from poor stability and poor reliability. Xylotek™ came in to get a stable platform up and running, and performed a migration from the old systems to the new – over a weekend! It was no easy task and required a SWAT-team type of approach. But Xylotek™ got the job done. Again in 2008, the acquisition of Brute Manufacturing represented another challenge. Brute hadn’t invested in IT and lacked user discipline. There were no established systems and no infrastructure in place. Once again, Xylotek™ got it done.
Benefits
Today Clemmer Steelcraft runs a virtual environment, which means no single component failure will create a problem. The company has taken advantage of ‘green’ computing benefits with the result that the space taken up by servers and cables is only 1/20th of what it used to be. What’s more, the system is reliable, stable, and secure. And users are happy. Says Graham Barraclough, Vice President of Finance for Clemmer Steelcraft Technologies: “Our relationship with Xylotek™ is built on trust. They recommend solutions for us that are business-effective, cost-effective, and IT-effective. They understand what we do and they understand the culture that exists here. Our IT manager has learned from them and they have learned from us too. Today they are very much part of our business.”