Case Study: Cloud Security Managed Services
See how WatServ worked with Davey Textile Solutions to enable cloud managed services for a data driven business.
Davey Textile Solutions Inc. has been offering solutions to the textile industry in Canada since 1986.
Operating out of a manufacturing facility in Edmonton, Alberta, and a distribution warehouse in Houston, Texas, Davey Textile Solutions has been offering protective fabric solutions to the local and global textile industry since 1986. Davey Textile focuses on the distribution and conversion of 3M™ Scotchlite™ Reflective Materials.
For Davey Textile, promoting industry safety is key. The company works with several standards committees that define safety requirements in industrial applications, and it is committed to developing extensive resources that aim to resolve safety concerns related to visibility in the petrochemical industry. Davey Textile is dedicated to creating new products that suit customer needs through research and development. Comprised of a small team, they rely on innovative technologies and specialized partners for support, which allows them to focus on their business goals.
Lessons learned along the way
Initially, Davey Textile used a server room to host its own environment. Then it had a catastrophic drive failure and lost three drives, full of critical data. When the IT team went to restore, they were shocked to find the backups were corrupted as well. Six months of production data was lost, but a foundational business principle was adopted – having a single point of failure isn’t good for building business resiliency, but the cloud is. “The big benefit of us moving to the cloud is that now I’m paying a monthly fee to ensure I have service all the time, and that a catastrophe like that never happens again. I’m not relying on a single point of failure like I was before,” says Dan King, VP of Production, Research & Development.
Like many businesses, Davey Textile turned to cloud security managed services to build stability and become agile. “What are you in business for? Because the answer to that is where you should be spending your time,” says King. “If your business is A and B equals C, why are you doing E, F, and G? If you’re not an expert in it, hire a specialist.”
King recommends companies hire third-party experts for things such as managing cloud and Microsoft Dynamics GP, because a specialist often has the resources to work faster, better and cheaper than an in-house team. The trick is to find the right partners.
The value in finding the right partner
Before discovering WatServ, Davey Textile worked with another hosting company in California, but challenges around reliability and cost continued to persist. “We had reasonable uptime, but not as high as we wanted. And costs, of course, just continued to increase over time” says King. “Not being thrilled, we raised the concerns with our software partner. We asked if they knew of other options when it came to hosting. They recommended WatServ. I’ve been pleased so far, and it keeps getting better – particularly around customer support, an area that many companies lack. With WatServ, both reliability and cost have improved, and they are located in Canada, which is another benefit.”
“When Davey Textile came to us in 2017, they had a unique environment with a mix of PCs and Macs,” says Sandy Low, Service Delivery Manager, WatServ. “Getting Microsoft Dynamics GP to communicate effectively with Apple endpoint software can be a bit tricky. So, working closely with their software partner, we customized the implementation to suit their specific needs. Together we created better communication between devices, and the move to the hosted environment on our private cloud was smooth.”
In WatServ, Davey Textile found an experienced partner to plan, operate and optimize its IT infrastructure. “WatServ provides depth and expertise in hosting Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP), both in private and public cloud,” says Serge Maric, Director of Customer Success, WatServ. “For many small-to-medium-sized businesses, skilled resources are stretched thin trying to do it all. WatServ can take over full management of the environment, overseeing security and risk mitigation, providing data storage, managing installations and upgrades, even web hosting. We find ways to make everything work for them in their environment, freeing people’s time and reducing extraneous overhead and management costs.”
Things just keep getting better
“I’ve been exponentially happier as our partnership history has progressed,” says King. “When I first moved from our old provider to WatServ, I was thrilled with how responsive they were and involved in everything – it was great. The service has evolved, and they’ve made the good situation I was in before even better. Now I have a regular cadence with Serge Maric, the Director of Customer Success from WatServ.”
The benefit of regular touchpoints with clients is to work together on supporting both short and long-term business goals and provide thought leadership and proactive optimization opportunities. These strategies are aimed to provide additional value and return on their investment, and act as a feedback channel for continuous improvement.
Davey Textile recently opted to implement the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), exploring the benefits of using IIoT to increase equipment and operational efficiencies and further its business goals. “I’m starting to see how IIoT will benefit us, being able to draw down all that data and manipulate it,” says King. “Right now, I’m working on a metric around overall equipment efficiencies, looking at the effectiveness of all our textile machines. My numbers are showing about 60% utilization. Why are we leaving 40% on the table? What’s missing? IIoT data is how I’m going to get to those answers.”
King mentioned his interest in IoT to Serge Maric at WatServ.
“On our last call, Serge brought one of their IoT specialists to have part of that conversation with me,” says King. “This is the value of those regular touchpoints I was talking about, not only are we following up on the open items from the previous call, but also strategizing on potential opportunities to help our business grow and be more efficient.”
WatServ strives to be a trusted advisor to its customers and the first call for any IT and business needs they have. We continuously evolve our solutions and partnership framework to meet the growing needs of customers — such as our emerging IoT practice.
76% of manufacturing executives intend to increase their investments in digital initiatives and plan to pilot and implement more Industry 4.0 technologies. 3
58% of manufacturers say IoT is a strategic necessity for digitally transforming industrial operations. 4
36% of manufacturing enterprises realize above-average business value from IT spending in digitalization compared with peers. 5
The global IoT in manufacturing market size is expected to grow from $33.2 billion in 2020 to $53.8 billion in 2025. 6
Combining expertise with exemplary service
Select Business Outcomes
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WatServ hosted regular status calls with Champion and their VAR partner to ensure transparent communications with all parties. These calls ensured both a proactive and reactive focus on performance, technical tuning and application optimizations. Over the years of working together, this amounted to more than 225 status calls.