Microsoft Operations Manager Case Study
The Printer Works of Arizona, Southern Nevada and Southern
California
Customer Profile
In 2003, The Printer Works, based in Hayward, California,
began its third decade as a leading independent supplier of
parts and accessories for popular office printers. An Authorized
Parts Reseller for Hewlett-Packard, The Printer Works specializes
in the LaserJet and DeskJet printer lines and offers parts
and sub-assemblies as well as expertly refurbished printers.
The Printer Works has 90 employees and four locations.
Business Situation
Five years ago The Printer Works began developing a web-based
eCommerce system that is now responsible for a significant
part of the company's sales. The Printer Works' web site (www.printerworks.com)
features a comprehensive searchable database plus online catalogs
with parts tables and exploded view diagrams of printer sub-assemblies.
These on-line features give The Printer Works a distinct competitive
edge.
Because office printers are complex electro-mechanical devices,
correctly identifying needed parts can be a major challenge
for the service personnel who make up the bulk of The Printer
Works' customers. By making it easy to identify parts, the
The Printer Works' web site has played a key role in building
a loyal customer base, even for clients who prefer to talk
to a live voice and who ultimately place orders by phone.
The success of their web site has made round-the-clock network
availability a necessity. “The printer parts business
is very competitive,” says Steve Roberts, founder and
president of The Printer Works. “If customers can’t
order a part when they need it, they can easily go to someone
else. Even on a weekend, downtime can cost us thousands of
dollars per hour in lost sales.”
But the real cost of network downtime could far exceed a
few lost sales opportunities. “Over the years our business
has changed from supplying parts for shelf stock to shipping
parts for emergency repair,” says Roberts. “Our
customers are under pressure to meet repair deadlines, and
their customers can be under the gun as well — for example,
they may have to print payroll. If a broken network prevents
us from shipping critical repair parts as promised, that can
ripple through the supply chain and cause our customers to
lose their customers. An hour or so of downtime on our end
could jeopardize a million dollar service contract for one
of our customers.”
The Printer Works relies on six Windows 2000 Servers to
deliver their IT infrastructure. The company has also deployed
voice over IP solutions to manage voice communications. This
has made a robust connectivity infrastructure even more critical.
“If your back-end systems are down," says Roberts,
"you can still do some business. But when your people
can’t talk on the phone to a customer, that is a very
big problem.”
Without a large, expensive in-house support staff to keep
continual watch over their IT infrastructure, The Printer
Works was continually at risk of costly downtime. “We
can't really afford to have network management experts watching
our system 24 hours a day," says Roberts, "but on
the other hand we can't really afford major breakdowns either.
What we needed was an affordable way to ensure network availability.”
Solution
The Printer Works outsourced their server and communications
infrastructure support to DCI. In the summer of 2002, DCI
implemented a full set of network monitoring tools, including
Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) to monitor Windows
2000 Servers. DCI also installed network router and traffic
monitoring tools.
Before DCI’s MOM-based solution, network problems
were handled reactively, after users complained about them.
This resulted in downtime that should have been preventable.
With the help of proactive, automated alerts and trend reports
generated by MOM, DCI is now able to anticipate network and
server problems before they become serious enough to impact
network availability. For example, when a server is approaching
a capacity limit, MOM will generate an alert so that resources
can be added before a crisis occurs. Thanks to MOM, DCI is
fixing problems before customers are aware that the problems
exist.
Benefits
The Printer Works' uptime has dramatically increased since
DCI deployed MOM. As an additional benefit, the confidence
The Printer Works gained by having a stable infrastructure
has induced the company to invest more in their web site to
add features that improve customer interactions. For example,
real-time XML-based querying to all the leading shippers allows
The Printer Works to give accurate shipping quotes on their
web orders and allows customers to shop for the best shipping
rates. Because the system can now email order status to customers
and provide links for additional information from the web
site, customer service time is reduced.
“MOM has saved us money in a lot of ways,” says
Roberts. “Our original goal was to reduce downtime,
and MOM has been a great success in that area. But our outsourcing
expenses have also stayed very reasonable, our performance
has been stable, and we've been able to support more network
activity and services without having to hire more internal
IT staff.”
MOM allows DCI to leverage its own support experts by automatically
generating critical problem alerts to the pagers and email
addresses of appropriate technicians and engineers based on
the severity level of the problem. “MOM allows us to
meet service level agreements without having to charge an
arm and a leg for support,” says Les Kent, president
of DCI. “This translates into satisfied customers and
less frazzled support people, because we end up doing less
work in crisis mode. We're convinced that the only way to
achieve high availability is by being proactive. Microsoft
Operations Manager is the most efficient way we know of to
manage the IT infrastructure of a small business.”
To learn more about Microsoft Operations Manager and how
DCI can help your small business achieve enterprise-class
network management by deploying this exciting new technology,
select one of these topics:
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