Keystone IT faced the challenge of improving operational efficiencies and workflows with minimal downtime or gaps in monitoring for systems that human life is dependent upon. The company needed a solution that would allow for a fully integrated ticketing system and merge both company’s databases and assets after acquiring another MSP, Cogent Innovators. The integration had to be seamless to ensure no disruption in service, especially given the critical nature of their healthcare clients' operations.

Initially operating as an office equipment dealership, ImageQuest was searching for the right technology partner who could help them integrate managed IT services into their portfolio and open new revenue streams. One of the biggest challenges they faced was finding good talent to support their growing IT client base. They needed a partner who could provide expertise and help them scale rapidly and seamlessly.

Clare Computer Solutions (CCS) was seeking a vendor to meet their needs for backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. They required a solution that was easy to set up and maintain, and that could be managed efficiently with minimal ongoing support. Additionally, they needed a vendor that could provide reliable technical support, especially during disaster recovery tests.

Genet Property Group, a longtime client of Solutions Squad Inc., faced an urgent situation when their office began filling with smoke. As a property management company that operates on billable hours, any downtime could severely impact their operations, including processing payments, leases, and coordinating showings. The VP of Operations at Genet immediately contacted David Moadab, Managing Partner at Solutions Squad, to address the issue. The primary concern was whether their critical business data was backed up, as any data loss could be catastrophic for their operations.

Ancero, a managed service provider, faced significant challenges in ensuring business continuity for a pharmaceutical client located in a flood-prone area with unreliable power. The client had to frequently rely on generators due to faulty power utilities, and the threat of flooding was a constant concern. During Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey experienced $30 billion in damages, highlighting the severe impact of such natural disasters. The pharmaceutical company eventually relocated to a new office with a more reliable power source, addressing a significant portion of their downtime threat. However, the need to secure and readily restore critical data such as marketing files, design work, and sensitive customer information remained a pressing issue.

Ethos Technologies, formerly Blue Ridge Copier, recognized that their customers' needs were evolving beyond traditional print services. As the IT industry transformed, they saw an opportunity to expand their offerings to include managed IT services. The primary challenge was to evaluate and select the right vendors for their new services, particularly for backup and disaster recovery. Doug Turpin, the Technical Director, faced difficulties in finding a solution that could protect mission-critical print servers and integrate with their Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool, ConnectWise. Additionally, they needed a vendor that offered flexible payment options and strong support to ensure seamless integration and customer satisfaction.

Trinity Networx faced a significant challenge when one of their clients, a staffing agency handling sensitive data, was infected with ransomware on two separate occasions. The infections occurred due to an employee downloading infected files via email. The ransomware posed a severe threat to the client's data security and operational continuity, necessitating immediate and effective action to prevent data loss and avoid paying a ransom.

Before partnering with Datto, Datcom faced significant challenges with their backup solutions. They were using multiple backup vendors and relied on Nas boxes for data storage, which was then replicated to secondary Nas boxes. This process was cumbersome and inefficient, especially during disaster recovery scenarios, leading to prolonged downtime for their customers. The need for a more streamlined and reliable backup solution became evident as the existing setup was not meeting the high standards required for effective disaster recovery and business continuity.

The client, a nonprofit organization, was preparing to migrate an email server to Office 365. They had a failing infrastructure without any business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solution. This posed a significant risk during the migration process. Swift Chip, the managed services provider, suggested implementing a Datto SIRIS to cover any bases during the process and to protect their data moving forward. Two weeks into the migration, the nonprofit’s server crashed, which could have led to a major catastrophe if not addressed immediately.

Maine Prosthodontics faced a critical situation when their server failed, causing potential downtime that could disrupt their dental practice operations. BEK Inc., a managed service provider, had to act quickly to ensure business continuity. The server failure was unexpected, and the dental office did not have a contingency plan in place. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the dental software was not initially compatible with the virtual machine setup. The challenge was to restore operations swiftly and efficiently without causing significant disruption to the dental practice.

A packaging manufacturer with dozens of manufacturing plants across North America faced the challenge of standardizing performance and driving continuous improvement across all facilities. The company operates in a highly competitive market characterized by slow or negative growth and razor-thin margins. To remain profitable, corporate leaders needed to optimize performance and quality while minimizing waste and defects. Ensuring customer satisfaction was also critical, requiring immediate identification and resolution of problems and consistent product quality across all plants. Corporate leaders envisioned a real-time data system to standardize these functions and enable a common language throughout the organization. This system would empower staff at all levels with timely, actionable data to efficiently monitor plant and employee performance and drive continuous improvement.

The Senior Business Analyst and the Manager of Corporate Continuous Quality Improvement for a major North American food processor faced a critical issue with product weight control. Implemented across the corporation with a variety of technologies and levels of discipline, the result was a patchwork quilt of compliance and raw material consumption. This led to a 'rear view mirror' method of driving corporate performance. The corporation enjoyed almost no economies of scale due to growth through acquisitions, with each facility having its own way of doing things. Accessing or sharing data was almost non-existent, and many facilities used paper-based data systems due to the high costs of computerizing a clean room environment. The Senior Business Analyst envisioned deploying real-time weight control data collection on inexpensive wireless PDA devices to eliminate paper, remove delays, and reduce errors. The new system needed to be easy-to-use for operators, flexible enough to support all of the company's needs, deployed from a single server, and integrated with the company's ERP system.

High-precision machining company Exacto Inc. tracked scrap data in their ERP system to monitor production and inventory. Once a month, Exacto leadership extracted scrap data into an Excel report for quality analysis. However, the process was cumbersome and the data was often four-to-six weeks old, making it almost useless for timely problem solving and process improvement. Leadership wanted the ability to do more with the ERP system data and wanted timely access to the data. Exacto was a longtime GainSeeker user for real-time shop floor SPC but had never implemented its powerful defect management system due to high labor costs. Manufacturing operations needed scrap data entered in the company’s ERP system to track WIP, inventory, and costing. The quality manager’s need for timely access to scrap data was left on a back burner and never moved forward.

Disparate Systems Impact Manufacturing Quality Due to Lack of Visibility Across Silos and a Reliance on Manual Approaches. A corporate quality manager has responsibility for ten plants in North America. Whenever he received a complaint from a customer he would cringe – he felt like he was personally letting his customer and his company down. And he felt powerless to change the situation. Each facility had their own way of tracking defect data, and as the company acquired new plants the problem got worse. At the end of the month, the corporate quality manager received ten reports of the plants’ issues and resolutions, each in its own format. Every month he spent hours and hours compiling data and looking for patterns. It was next to impossible to figure out the root cause of the problem, let alone try to resolve it. “It was difficult for me to understand which plants were doing well… and which plants were not doing well.” Direct Impact on Quality. Disparate systems caused confusion. Customer complaints continued to mount. The corporate quality manager “could not guarantee customers were getting quality products.” The company needed to find a way to improve their quality across the board.

The Plant Manager for a chip manufacturing company is responsible for cost management, efficiency, and overall profitability. Chips aren’t cheap and neither are the film bags they come in. Although every chip that gets overfilled in the bag costs almost nothing, given the volume of production a year, it adds up quickly. An even greater cost are the film bags that get damaged during production and aren’t able to be used. Producing so many bags a year means that the slightest change in the production has a dramatic impact on net income. Maximizing production while decreasing costs is a daunting task, especially when the bag sizes are getting smaller and smaller, leaving less room for error. The Plant Manager wanted to be able to monitor the overfill of chips and the film wastes of bag production. It was necessary to educate the workers on NIST 133 and to keep them accountable for monitoring these signals in order to increase profits while meeting standards.

An automotive customer set higher expectations for the quality data reporting of its supplier, a mid-sized, Midwest-based plastics company. The supplier’s Quality Manager (QM) now has to find time to select and implement a new real-time SPC system. The QM has to research the marketplace to choose and implement the best real-time SPC software system for his company. However, the QM doesn’t have the time or resources to complete a comprehensive evaluation, and corporate is reluctant to implement a major capital expenditure mid-budget year. The QM needs a way to test and prove the value of a real-time automated SPC system without creating a capital project and without turning his attention from other urgent tasks.

Dan Wadyka, Assistant Director of Quality Control at Giorgio Foods, faced a significant challenge. New company leadership was pushing for major growth and change, but some managers and supervisors felt that the current way of working was good enough. Production workers tracked product weights on the production line for frozen pizzas manually, recording data on paper. This manual process meant that line supervisors were only concerned with the current production run, and if problems arose, managers spent hours compiling hand-written data before they could make sense of what happened. The lack of timely information did not allow for impactful insights into production processes, leading to high costs from waste and overpack. Wadyka had an intuition that the impact was significant and inhibiting the growth of the business. He needed data to build momentum for change and appeal to his colleagues' heads and hearts.

A senior quality engineer for a leading machining company faced alarming scrap levels, with only hindsight data available to prevent it. Precision was crucial for the intricate manufactured components. The company had five work zones with a first-pass yield of only 40 percent, generating staggering annual scrap costs. Pertinent inspection data was manually collected and recorded, making it costly and difficult to manage. Weeks often passed before usable data became available, allowing defective products to pass through manufacturing processes with hidden issues. Identifying underlying issues required extensive efforts from Six Sigma Black Belts, often long after the fact.

Pressure to Improve\nIf you’re like our other clients, you’re frustrated. You’re under pressure to improve performance, but you can’t get the insights you need fast enough. One described it like running through a room full of furniture with the lights out: you keep crashing into things but you have to get up and keep moving.\nThis situation is grossly unfair. To drive performance you need to turn on the lights with insights provided by actionable data.\nThe most frustrating thing is that most people are buried in data. But it’s not usable because it’s a hodge-podge patchwork of spreadsheets, custom apps, paper systems, and disconnected legacy systems.\nDriving improvement in this kind of world is really, really hard because you’re always reacting, and you’re always late. You’re reacting because you can’t see problems until they become obvious. And you’re late because it takes too long to get to actionable information. This is not a sustainable way to drive performance improvement.\nDealing with Yesterday’s Problems\nIf you’re reacting and you’re late, you’re dealing with yesterday’s problems.\nExpensive sort and rework efforts must go all the way back to the last good data point. That increases WIP and increases order-to- cash cycle times. Unplanned downtime impacts schedule adherence, and to compensate, many leaders create a buffer in finished goods inventory, driving up costs. And when defects escape to the customer, they damage trust and confidence.

Senior Flexonics - GA Precision, Wisconsin, faced a significant challenge in accurately determining the tool life for each of the thousands of tools used in their manufacturing processes. The Business Unit Manager, Phil Kapalczynski, doubted the claims made by tooling vendors regarding tool life but lacked accurate data to verify these claims. The existing method of tracking tool life was cumbersome, relying on paper records that were often incomplete or difficult to interpret. This lack of reliable data made it challenging to ensure that operators accurately documented tool failure and replacement, leading to inefficiencies and potential downtime. Kapalczynski envisioned a cost-effective, automated method to track tool life, identify problem tools, increase uptime, and eliminate second-guessing. Accurate data records were needed to hold vendors accountable when tools did not perform as promised.

The Senior Quality Manager for a multi-plant packaging company faced a significant performance gap between plants, with lower-performing facilities lagging by as much as 20% on key indicators such as line speed and quality levels. This disparity made it difficult to support the company's drive for a more flexible supply chain, as disparate systems hindered the ability to move products between plants to handle urgent orders. The underlying cause was identified as the use of different quality software systems and a lack of necessary infrastructure in poorer-performing facilities. The Chief Information Officer also recognized the need to standardize quality systems across newly acquired plants to minimize the cost of ownership and streamline support, despite anticipated resistance from staff.

Consolidated Container Company (CCC) faced significant challenges due to outdated legacy information systems and a lack of standardized quality data systems across its 59 manufacturing facilities. This inconsistency led to difficulties in obtaining accurate, actionable quality information, with some plants relying on archaic technology and paper-based workflows. The lack of a shared data platform made it hard for leaders to gain visibility into plant operations, resulting in quality issues that impacted customer satisfaction. The urgency to address these challenges increased when new ownership and senior leadership, experienced in industries with real-time Statistical Process Control data, took over in 2012. They demanded corporate-wide visibility into quality data, necessitating an evolution in CCC's quality data systems.

The Operations Manager for a leading manufacturer of electronic operator interface solutions faced a critical issue: the lack of timely access to essential business metrics such as monthly sales goals, gross profit margin, on-time deliveries, and first pass yield targets. This deficiency made it challenging to meet production goals while maintaining quality. The company had critical data stored in its ERP system (AS400), but extracting and formatting this data required special queries and manual processing in spreadsheets, which was cumbersome and time-consuming. As a result, the necessary information was often not available in a timely manner, severely hampering the manager's ability to make informed business decisions. The Operations Manager envisioned a solution where he could turn on his computer every morning and review a daily dashboard of the company's critical business metrics, generated automatically, with the ability to drill down into more detailed information as needed.

The president of an industrial goods manufacturing company faced a critical issue where high-powered engineers were spending excessive time scrubbing data and building databases instead of analyzing and acting on it. The company needed to improve on-time delivery quickly, but the existing archaic SPC software had cumbersome retrieval routines and provided few controls over data entry, leading to inconsistent data that required extensive cleaning. Additionally, there was no direct link to Minitab for advanced analysis. The president and his team identified several Critical to Quality characteristics for a new system, including data entry mistake-proofing tools, RS232 compatibility, the ability to collect more data with no more operator pain, the ability to interface with existing databases and software, and ease of use by both operators and engineers.

The quality manager for a consumer goods packaging company faced a critical issue due to recent automation of the ingredient mixing process. While automation increased first pass yield, line efficiency, and throughput, it eliminated the meticulous records previously kept by inspectors. This posed a challenge in ensuring quality data to support federal regulations, especially for long-term stability of the consumer product. The quality team envisioned software that would automatically collect data from the PLCs controlling the flow meters, providing accurate inspection documentation to satisfy federal regulators in the event of a product recall.

As the private label producer of baked goods for major brands, the company's reputation relies on ensuring that each cracker and cookie it produces meets the taste, quality expectations, and specifications of its customer's brand. Company leadership wanted to shift the company from knowledge-driven behavior to data-driven behavior. They believed that real-time data, delivered via real-time statistical process control charts, was the key to this effort. This data would enable them to reduce variation at critical points in the process and thereby increase the consistency of processes, and ultimately, the finished product.

Customer satisfaction is a critical issue for the McCormick Flavor Division, which produces sauces, dressings, and condiments for major restaurants and fast food chains. The company faced challenges in presenting data during customer audits and needed to improve their process control to reduce waste and improve the bottom line. They also needed to better understand the natural variation in their processes to make adjustments closer to target fill weights and reduce material costs.

The engineering and quality leaders at a consumer goods packaging company saw an opportunity to increase throughput and profitability by automating the ingredient mixing process. The existing manual process involved significant downtime and inefficiencies, particularly during product changeovers, which required shutting down high-speed lines for 5 to 10 minutes multiple times a day. This downtime added up to a significant amount of lost production time. Additionally, the manual mixing process was labor-intensive and required meticulous documentation to meet regulatory requirements. The company needed a solution that would not only automate the mixing process but also ensure compliance with regulatory standards.

In one facility, the company produces more than 435,000 pounds of finished product every day on 22 packaging lines. While the plant is a sparkling clean state-of-the-art facility, the methods they used to control their processes haven’t always been as sophisticated. As recently as two years ago, the SPC system used for weight control was a paper-based X-Bar and R chart. With clipboard and pencil in hand, quality technicians would measure the package weights of small samples periodically from each package line. They would then compute the average weight of the sample and the range and record the information, along with some process data, on a standard form. The information was then submitted to a quality analyst at the end of each shift. The next morning, the analyst reviewed the data for missing information or errors, corrected any mistakes, and then passed it along to a key-punch operator to be keyed into a computer-based SPC package. Two days after the process data was collected, X-Bar and R charts were printed out along with Process Capability information for review by quality engineers and production managers. With only this rear view mirror perspective, managers and engineers were caught in a daily routine of trying to understand what happened at least two days before. And if process changes were not detected when they happened, product holds and costly sorting and repackaging would result. The need for timely information pointed to the need for a technology improvement, but the clean room environment at the company’s plants creates a unique challenge for technology solutions. Any hardware installed on the manufacturing floor has to tolerate hose-downs with a disinfecting solution. Traditional technology solutions – hardened computers or putting computers in sealed enclosures – were prohibitively expensive and never made it to the shop floor. That changed with the advent of low-cost wireless networks and portable handheld devices.

PLZ Aeroscience faced significant challenges due to their legacy paper-based data management systems. As the company grew through acquisitions and expansion, they needed to consolidate these legacy systems to improve operating efficiencies. The existing quality systems were inefficient, with inspectors manually recording data on paper, leading to difficulties in understanding product performance and comparing different machines or tooling. The information was often stuck on the factory floor, hidden from view, and the quality team spent considerable time managing rework when processes ranged out of specification. Rising staffing costs, customer complaints, poor efficiencies, and high inventory carrying costs further impacted profitability. The company was caught between high corporate expectations and the current reality of operating performance, necessitating a change.