Manufacturers are often cited as classic examples of failure to
adapt to new circumstances. But the very opposite happened at Greene, Tweed, a
privately-held firm, which began as a New York hardware company in 1863.
Leather-braided buggy whips were just one of dozens of products Greene, Tweed
made in the 19th century; and one of literally thousands it has made
since evolving into a sophisticated, worldwide, technologically-oriented
manufacturer headquartered in Kulpsville, PA. Today, Greene, Tweed’s elastomers,
thermoplastic composites and other materials are widely used in the aerospace,
semiconductor, oilfield and petrochemical industries.
Ethan Hill, Greene, Tweed’s Senior IT Manager for Infrastructure,
says “When I first started at Greene, Tweed, we were at the nexus of
transitioning from a small manufacturing company to a multi-national
corporation. As our revenues increased, our IT practices were dramatically
changing. We had some advanced IT systems and had just implemented SAP, but
there were no such concepts as virtualization or high-speed networking.”
About six years ago, the company brought in Anexinet, an award-winning
systems integrator and technology management company with a record of enabling
mid-size and Fortune 1000 clients to optimize the value of their IT investments.
Anexinet recommends, designs, delivers and supports systems integration with
leading technology partners to align IT with a client’s business goals.
“It was the right move at
the right time,” says Hill. “We had legacy, siloed systems that didn’t allow us
to optimize the resource utilization of our IT capital investments. When I brought in Anexinet, we did an
evaluation of the current state of our data center. With their help, we spent several
months educating ourselves and management on the enabling systems and processes
that exist to take our data center from individual pizza boxes that serve one
function, to where we are today with a fully virtualized backend storage
infrastructure as well as the VMWare application infrastructure.”
Greene, Tweed’s previous storage silos required substantial manual
care and had large amounts of unusable space because they were not shareable. These
were replaced with a high-speed fiber-optic storage area network. “This has
allowed us to be much more responsive, flexible and adaptive to the
ever-changing needs of our growing company,” says Hill. The single greatest
effect, he adds, has been the boost in productive manufacturing time made
possible by the reduced downtime associated with maintaining IT infrastructure.
“We’ve dramatically increased availability of the systems so that manufacturing
can have three shifts over the weekend with very infrequent system
interruptions. This has also eased the burden on our IT staff.”
Hill gives Anexinet much of the credit for these and other
improvements. One thing he appreciates “is the ability for me to maintain a
lean IT staff and supplement with specialist consulting when needed.” Another
is that Anexinet is “so intimately familiar with our infrastructure, that the
ability for them to provide solutions to problems that I identify is hard to
match. There is no ramp up time. They’re also able to help me understand
industry trends and opportunities for improvement.”
Most important, Hill says, is Anexinet’s dedication to their
customers which is “second to none. For example, we had a significant failure
of a piece of hardware that was central to our operations while I was on
vacation in Disney World with my family. A power outage caused an entire blade
center to go down, and I learned about it while waiting in line at Space
Mountain. I made one call on my cell phone to the management team over at
Anexinet, and two hours later, five of their staff members were on site
repairing the problem. Their ability to bring specialist resources to bear and
their commitment to their customer was unparalleled.”
“I definitely intend to
continue working with them,” Hill concludes. “I have happily endorsed their
services to other customers. They are true trusted advisors. I’m looking
forward to a relationship with Anexinet for a long, long time.”
Labels: client case study, Gtweed