The Situation
As a company in distress and facing Chapter 11,
Blindsgalore.com had an IT department implosion.
Click here
to read a letter from Acting CEO, Richard Couch.
Having lost the entire IT department during the initial
stages of faltering, Blindsgalore.com needed immediate
impartial IT support across the board.
The Client
Blindsgalore.com is America's leading online retailer
for window treatments. Since founded in 1981
as a specialty window covering and interior design
company, their business has grown and branched out in
several different areas.
Blindsgalore.com sells a complete
line of window coverings from famous manufacturers like
Hunter Douglas, Levolor, Kirsch, Bali, Graber and
Prestige, as well as their own Blindsgalore.com family
of products. Blindsgalore.com is an authorized dealer
for most major national brands. Blindsgalore.com sells
everything from the most basic window treatment to the
most exotic, and everything in between. Blindsgalore.com
operates a 7-day-a-week call center in addition to
geographically load balanced server farms in enterprise
data centers across the US. Blindsgalore.com is a
true 24/7 online business that requires 24/7 support.
The Problem
During the initial faltering and with dwindling funds, Blindsgalore.com
had no choice but to lay off employees, including their
entire in-house IT department. Once the decision
was made to resurrect the business and bring all systems
back online most of the IT staff had moved on.
Management needed a tiger team of IT experts to jump in
and take over. This project required not only bringing all
company wide systems back online, but also mobilizing IT
functions along with reconstituting spotty systems,
programming and business process documentation.
Where SBSI Comes In
Although bankrupt, Blindsgalore.com was determined to remain
a viable company. Being a technology dependent company without
an IT department, Blindsgalore.com sought out the aid of Shaw Binary
Systems, Inc. (SBSI) to provide a complete IT
outsourcing solution. SBSI offers a complementary set
of IT production business units that can be utilized
independently or combined together as a great ensemble.
The business units are: (a) IT Services which provides typical
end-user support along with enterprise server and
network support. (b) Business Automation which provides
programming, integration, and business analyst services.
(c) Managed Services which provides 24/7 enterprise
datacenter services and network operations center
support (NOC). Blindsgalore.com benefited greatly
from SBSI's ability to mobilize all three business units
to their immediate support.
The Solution
SBSI came in and acted as a stand-in IT department and
preformed a great ensemble.
(a) IT Services: SBSI’s
IT services team was the first on site and took
preliminary requirements and made initial assessments.
Once acclimated to the situation, the IT Services team
addressed immediate concerns driven by the client. After
the operational environment was secured and actions had
been taken to ensure short term stability, SBSI then turn
toward developing and executing a long term action plan.
This plan addressed the general health of the IT
infrastructure actions to insure future stability.
First the SBSI team created and deployed a comprehensive
disaster recovery plan. Then SBSI rebuilt and
consolidated all essential servers and end-user
workstations. Additionally, the IT Services team deployed
multiple levels and types of key management software to
give real-time control over the entire network and
server environment. Lastly, SBSI was asked to help Blindsgalore.com meet the requirements of the bankruptcy
courts such as complete inventory of IT assets and
software licenses, mass e-mailings to customers
information regarding the bankruptcy, and data mining
for state tax audits.
(b) Business
Automation: The Business Automation group had the
daunting task of documenting all systems, programming,
and business processes. Once a good picture of the
environment and production were created, SBSI then turn
to programming a new streamlined product for the backend
business processes. With a requirement of creating an
automated environment where 1/3 of the staff could
accomplish the same production levels previously
performed, SBSI dug right in. Yes, SBSI produced improved process
efficiency through automation with a goal of reducing
operating cost.
(c) Managed
Services: The first task for Managed Services
was to aggressively lock down all datacenters.
Blindsgalore.com had 3 datacenters located in the US and
England. SBSI physically disabled all access to the
entire production. Working through the night, SBSI
restored production, having completed security
reinitialized states, an exhaustive audit and inventory
both physically and of functionality for all data center
devices. Once the integrity of a secure and
documented environment was reestablished, SBSI then
proceeded over the course of a month to rebuild the
entire datacenter infrastructure to bring a level of
stability to blindsgalore.com that SBSI and its
customers are accustomed to. To this day, the
production metrics of the datacenter under SBSI control
have significantly exceeded those of previous history.
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