Case Study / Star Quality Office Furniture
Background
Star Quality Office Furniture was established in 1979. The company began as a manufacturer of high-quality, fully-assembled, office furniture. The product line included desks, credenzas, hutches, and storage and filing cabinets. Today it is much more than that. It manufactures a wide variety of new office furniture, not only traditional office desks but secretarial desks and workstations, and also multimedia computer desks and accessories. In fact, Star Quality Office Furniture is now a recognized leader in developing unique and ergonomic office furniture. The company, which uses the most advanced computer-assisted design (CAD) technology to design and manufacture its products, operates from Toronto-based, state-of-the-art manufacturing and warehouse facilities comprising 130,000 square feet.
Challenge
Until 2006, Star Quality’s manufacturing and warehouse operations were housed in a single building. But that year the company expanded, and began to rent a separate warehouse facility. It was crucial that staff in the warehouse could communicate effectively with staff at head office. The company’s entire distribution system – shipping, invoicing, documentation – was all done through the warehouse. However, the new, two-location operation wasn’t working well. The backup system wasn’t reliable, and if the company’s servers ever failed, a very serious issue of data recoverability presented itself. There was a real danger of losing data and not being in a position of being able to recover it. Not only that, but computers and servers were often down.
Solution
Joe Lampert is Vice President of Finance for Star Quality Office Furniture. He says he has had problems with IT ever since he first got into industry accounting back in 1985. And why? Says Lampert: “In the world of IT support, you find that people will often take on more than they can handle. They want to get the sale. But many people who work in this field just aren’t qualified for the tasks they confront. They can’t get the job done. When we were having all our problems, we needed to find some local expertise.”
They found Xylotek™. In no time at all, employees who worked in the company’s warehouse were able to access the ERP system – quickly and reliably. A backup system was put in place, and Xylotek™ engineers implemented a remote access server. That made all the difference.
Benefits
Today, Xylotek™ does ongoing preventive maintenance for Star Quality Office Furniture. It issues a regular report on the company’s IT system, and Joe Lampert is happy about that. “It isn’t my job to deal with IT issues,” he says, “and when you spend a lot of time doing that, it’s very frustrating. The people at Xylotek™ have taken the whole of IT off my plate, so I no longer worry about it. I can rely on them and concentrate on my job.”