Case Studies

Tenere, a manufacturing company with locations in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Mexico, had run out of bandwidth on their networks. As a result, everything from the manufacturing machines, job management software, warehouse management, shipping systems, and front office was attached to the networks that spanned their buildings and locations. Unfortunately, this prevented Tenere from connecting additional equipment to the network, such as security cameras.

Compounding the problem, the internal IT resource quit the project after he had ordered $107,000 of equipment that was on a lease and sitting in boxes.

Tenere reached out to Wayfinder IT Solutions and asked if we could pick up the project. Upon reviewing the project notes, we realized no discovery or design work had been done. For example, no one had mapped out the wireless zones in each building for the new wireless access points. Wayfinder IT Solutions project managers and engineers visited each location to create the physical and logical design work. We then created a statement of work.

For the Wisconsin locations, a Layer 1 infrastructure problem existed. The wiring coming into the building couldn't handle the required bandwidth, and their internal Cat5 wiring was old and not correctly terminated. As a result, Wayfinder IT Solutions personnel brought in 10 Gbit fiber backbone 6 strand connections and rewired seven buildings.

Wayfinder IT Solutions had three teams. One to bring in the 10Gbit 6 strands of fiber and the rewiring of 7 buildings in multiple locations. The second for the physical network that configured and installed the Cisco switches and firewalls. The third team designed, did the wireless mapping, and installed the new wireless network. We completed the project in under four months—ahead of schedule and under budget. Cutover during the last two weeks of December went smoothly per location.